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Finally escaping Windows, ironically thanks to AI (lemmy.world)
submitted 21 hours ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 36 points 20 hours ago (10 children)

Just RTFM!!!!

*reads the manual and there’s nothing about this*

…ok. Now what?

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  • [–] 41 points 20 hours ago* (5 children)

    Sorry, that guide was written for systems running systemd and the install manual you followed was a from an opinionated Arch user for SysVinit.

    Oh, this guide is 11 years old written by someone who hated Wayland, so no, modern KDE won’t work with it.

    Just use Arch Wiki, it’s the best for beginners, but also don’t install Arch unless you know what you’re doing already because it’s the worst for beginners.

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  • [+] -9 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

    Yeah, any time someone tells me to just read the arch wiki for something unrelated to arch I automatically know they will never provide anything valuable to humanity

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  • [–] 5 points 16 hours ago*

    I have made the completely opposite experience. I tried so many distros and every single time some non-trivial issues came up my search ended in the arch wiki finally explaining stuff and writing out available options in config files instead of just telling my what option in what GUI config tool (that might or might not exist in my distro) I should click, then pray it works (felt very alike to windows actually where you get two dozen guides to solve a problem, each one editing another obscure registry key and trying to find the one actually working with the current version).

    So I wasted years listening to the "No, Archlinux is a meme and totally unusable for inexperienced people" before installing archlinux, which is now running for more than 9 years without problems, and will happily point people asking questions for other distros to the relevant parts of the arch wiki that actually spell stuff out properly.

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  • [–] 8 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    Now search for a stack overflow comment, with one answer that's not relevant and doesn't work anymore and 30 "this is a duplicate it's already been answered in a post 10 years ago", and 1 niche forum with someone who had the exact issue, followed with "Thanks I figured it out".

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  • [–] 12 points 19 hours ago

    I suspect that LLMs do pretty well with troubleshooting Linux thanks to those manuals and old forum posts. After using them to troubleshoot Linux based devices, I tried the same thing on Windows and it struggled to figure out what commands to run.

    Windows is a mess to configure and troubleshoot, even with the help of LLMs. Microsoft could have spent their investment trying to fix that, but I don't think they have.

    "Copilot can troubleshoot your computer" could have been a selling point, but they'd have to admit that windows 11 is a buggy mess

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  • [–] 1 point 19 hours ago

    Yeah that's the proper way to do it.

    There's a guy at work constantly asking AI everything on his second screen. He came to me after failing to figure out an issue using it. I said "oh yeah let's look at the documentation, I bet there's an example for this exact scenario" and sure enough there was. Made the change, tested and working.

    On the other hand, any time I want to do something with Ansible, I start off reading the docs, can't find what I need, scour a bunch of search results, and when that fails somehow AI can produce a working example of what I need in a few tries.

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