I was told the same thing about resetting the CMOS battery when I was new to Linux and an update broke my graphic shell (yes, it was an arch-based distro).

I was asking Lumo and Mistral for help recovering it because I didn't even know enough to know how to try the solutions mentioned in the forums. That was the first thing I asked them, and once I tried it it didn't work anyway so then I started troubleshooting with the chatbots.

Some of the stuff they told me sounded crazy, like taking the laptop apart and resetting the CMOS battery, but fortunately I knew they weren't infallible so I decided to go ahead and not do that. Also I was too lazy to try, and wouldn't trust myself to anyway. But mainly I thought that seemed more likely to break things even worse, so I didn't.

I kept asking questions, narrowing things down, adding detail about precisely what was happening and what the problem was. Eventually it told me (I forget which one) how to check my Plasma version and roll it back to the previous one, as well as backing up my config dotfiles, resetting them, and selectively restoring them one at a time. Between those solutions, it worked, and I got my graphic shell back.

This was after fixing something else that I had broken myself when I tried solving it without a chatbot, when I misunderstood the instructions on the forum and went to the UEFI menu instead of the GRUB terminal or TTY, and accidentally changed my boot disk to my unallocated spare drive.

I learned a lot about Linux systems that day. Prior to that I always considered myself a non-techie. I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Apple, which I had tried too).

It was my trial by fire, and I honestly wouldn't have gotten through it without Mistral. That being said, I also would have probably broken my system beyond repair if I had blindly trusted everything Mistral said.

It's helped me with some other things too. Encrypting an external hard drive; using rsync and Borg; learning GParted, Ventoy, and BalenaEtcher, as well as clamAv, maldet, rkhunter, and aide; setting up anacron scripts; recovering a waterfox profile after an update seemed to reset everything.

None of which I would have been able to do on my own. Even following the forums, the instructions assumed a certain baseline level of knowledge that I didn't have yet. Chatbots can be helpful, even free ones. It just takes some critical thinking, a healthy dose of skepticism, and a little bit of interrogation, clarification, and troubleshooting.

One of my next projects will be to self-host a smaller model to minimize environmental impact and be more self-reliant and offline/resilient