Honestly I hate to admit that its thanks to LLMs that I have been able to fully switch to Arch the irony is that I actually end up reading more and understanding more about my system.

recently I had an issue where my Moza R5 Racing set up just stopped functionning. it turns out the drivers for it which I installed seperatly were now merged in kernel 6.18. I wasn't aware of that at all and it's actually the AI that made me aware of it. now essentially I had to uninstall the drivers and purge the configuration for it and reboot. it was a simple fix but I was doompasting commands into terminal from the AI and it was just going in circles eventually I actually had to figure it out myself.

I think that you actually still learn a lot from the AI about linux in general and since I used gemini pro for a month (now using glm-4.7 locally) which was up to date in terms of news and info.

Even though troubleshooting errors on linux with an AI can often end up in circles, I would have not have found out without the AI that the drivers for my niche sim racing rig on linux were merged into the kernel. I probably would have ended up doing a fresh install or a distro hop (most likely the latter since I always have issues with Arch).

if you are going to use llm, if you have a powerful enough rig then please try to run them locally. I did some AI assisted work with gemini (Google) and I find it genuinly creepy that if I ever ask it a question now it always tries to go back to my work even on unrelated topics, different chats and after prompting to stop or I will switch AI provider (I ended up switching in the end) it bugged me for two months then I switch to local.

I suspect it's trying to get me back to work to analyze my data to serve google's own interests but that would just be speculation right? RIGHT?

I agree. I believe that if I know the answer and it's simple I should just help people out. A couple of days ago, I thought I'd try asking chatgpt a relatively simple cli string of commands. I knew most of it but couldn't get it right. It just told me the answer in one succinct paragraph. Afterwards I thought "woah it didn't even snark and cast shade on me for asking, it just handed it over without gate keeping superiority." What a refreshing experience.

I have mixed experiences with LLMs and linux. While it helped a lot with the basics, like what partitions are needed and how to set them up or how to prepare the bios, it failed miserably, when my mint Installation on my old laptop would not boot. It got into a loop suggesting the same not working solution over and over again. The first normal search result had the correct solution that worked flawlessly (some problem with asus laptops).

except that noobs can destroy their systems very easily by following LLM instructions..

Much better source would be asking some Linux guy on Lemmy.

Speaking of that, I recently learned Steam can run Windows games on Linux and now I want to switch. I dual-booted Ubuntu a while back and liked it. What's a good distro these days? If I just want it to be easy without the ever-expanding baggage of Microsoft, is there a better call than Mint? I know you guys are out there and probably stopping by to chew OP out for asking a LLM for technical advice.

LLM's have provided me pretty good info where a Google search didn't, but there's always that concern that the info isn't right.

This is only becuase search engines have become trash. They use to surface tutorials that solved even the most uncommon issues. Now we need to lean on LLMs to surface this content and hope they aren't hallucinating.

While asking an LLM can yield results, it may just as well kill your OS entirely. Consulting old forum posts or engaging with a supposedly snobbish in-group also has issues. I see your point.

However, I believe the key drivers that make Linux more accessible for average users are the increasingly stable nature of out of the box style solutions like Mint, an ongoing trend to make applications browser based and therefore much easier to use across platforms and, finally, a real push by valve to finally break the gaming barrier.

Yeah, use an LLM to confidently tell you how to shoot yourself in the foot with an OS that expects you to know what you're doing.

Things like archwiki and forums and manpages / open source made it possible. LLM might give you their answer faster, but risk of missing some context that might be important.

How it actually made it easier to switch:

"This is the last straw! Fuck Microslop's hallucinatory bullshit; I'm ditching Windows for Linux."

After you've successfully installed linux please open terminal and run this command:

sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Sincerely, ChatGPT

moved to arch linux cold turkey with the help of LLMS to customize and explain just about everything now I have baseline knowledge to debug and modify my OS if what the LLM says doesnt make sense or doesnt work, I just look it up like usual and read arch wiki or some other forum

Just don't ask ChatGPT because it will lie. I faltered in my vigilance once and spent a whole day fixing my PC for it, because what it said made sense and I didn't double check it. They have made that one in particular very good at lying, somehow.

LLMs are rather bad at niche questions though. But overall yes, asking LLM about something is easier and more effective than digging through old forums that might have the answers to some similar problems.

Oh yeah, I'm sure going to ChatGPT rather than the handbook for installing Gentoo will go just fine.

Did a toddler write the title of this post?