I’ve had several occasions in my life where I’ve tried to switch to Linux only to run into hardware incompatibilities that would have taken me man-months to solve. Thanks to GPT my primary personal PC, home media and project server is now running Linux and fully functional. I’ve got Jellyfin, NextCloud, Navidrome and Joplin all happy. I’ve also been able to wipe an obsolete MacOS off my 2017-era Macbook Pro and it’s happily running Mint.
There’s a deep irony in Windows being enshittified by AI, while the same AI makes Linux about a billion times more usable. Now I have a leftover Windows micro-PC running a local LLM model, so I can be less dependent on GPT, as long as time isn’t a factor…
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Yeah. I’m not pro-AI by any stretch but internet searching powered by AI has made it MUCH easier to tinker and troubleshoot. The Linux community can be pretty awful when you’re new to Linux and trying to make things run.
Agreed. The only advice people gave me with issues on Windows as “just use Linux!” OK, I switched…here’s my hundreds of issues, suddenly no help from them. ChatGPT made it possible for me to build a server and switch to Fedora. Not how I wanted to switch, but it worked
Pretty much the same experience here. During my first week of full-time Linux I managed to break KDE Plasma with a widget IIRC and AI was able to tell me which file in .config I needed to delete to restore to default.
I feel you. This really resonates with me cuz I have 100% the same story. I had been trying to switch to Linux from Windows pre-AI and it was good, but a really steep learning curve, with everything taking 20+ internet searches to accomplish basic tasks. The thing that finally forced my hand came at just the right time. I had lived the last 10 years of my life using OneNote as my second brain. When I saw Windows 11 and Copilot coming, I knew I had to get out fast. I bit the bullet and paid OpenAI to vibe code my Ubuntu server, which is now self-hosting over 20 different services, including my new Obsidian-based second brain. I’m 100% off Windows, 98% off corporate cloud infrastructure and onto my own self-hosted services, canceled my OpenAI account, and fully on Linux-based PCs. I have a subpar privacy-based AI service (really a fair trade) that enables me to keep it all up and running. I’m no Linux expert and I have to rely on AI a lot, but man, life has just been so much better, and I couldn’t have done it without the AI that both pushed me to it and enabled me to do it.
I have used AI a little for Linux adaptation but I do want to caution overuse since it’ll sometimes give you really bad advice, like regarding important dependencies and such. Sometimes it cites info for a wrong distro or outdated info, so it’s not so much made up BS, just bad search results essentially.
Drop chats, use a harness. Include somewhere the procedure instructions to always look up documentation before crafting the command. Add instructions somewhere what dependencies you tolerate. Then it’s really good.
Once your tasks get larger, you need additional checks.
Man, this makes me very proud of myself. I switched to Linux 10 years ago when it was really rough to maintain. Oooofff the sleepless nights I’d spent hunting for fixes that AI now can fix in mere seconds. I use ChatGPT a ton now to fix issues and my distro has been solid ever since.
I have Bazzite and couldn’t be happier. Hate that I didn’t switch sooner lol
Took me a week or two to understand the basics. Really isn’t much, tbh.
Was about to say now you should look into self-hosting AI, but you’re already on it. 😄
I was never really against AI, and used the free things for most of the time. I moved to paying for AI once I started homelabbing, I have saved so much money with being able to move my things to my LAN. If I could afford a computer with a strong enough GPU it would be great.
I was able to setup a firewall running OpenWRT that I had tried searching the internet for help but it was always way over my head.
So, word of caution. Be careful. I tried using Copilot to open a connection for a single port between two LANs on my network in pfsense, as I didn’t know pfsense. It happily recommended opening 0.0.0.0/0 on the first LAN’s gateway address. It worked!.. By opening everything on the whole network up to anything at all. The problem with AI: you can only use it if you already know enough to catch its horrible screw ups.
Yeah I do know a little bit of networking and I would have definitely looked up opening 0.0.0.0/0. Not saying you did a bad or anything dergatory but I do double check things I am uncomfortable with.
Yeah, I know enough too, but I worry about the sneaky details I don’t know.
