I may get some heat here but installing LM Studio, (think a personally hosted chat gpt), has helped me far more than any online forum due to the sheer amount of outdated linux information. I highly suggest hosting a model and using it for most of your questions.
I know this doesn’t help other people with similar issues, but I likely would have stopped using linux without it.
I do think ai tools can be really good for this! They often do a good job of explaining why to do things and allowing for follow-up questions, rather than just what to do, and what the manual says.
The one thing to be careful of is that they also sometimes give those outdated or unnecessary answers, just like the web does. It’s worth asking the same thing a few times and maybe doing a web search for their suggestions to double check (it can still be better than just trying to search through forums, stack overflow and archwiki yourself without knowing exactly what to search for and which things apply to you).
Sometimes beginners in Linux fall into rabbit holes following ai instructions or online tutorials that suggest huge complex things like manually compiling and repackaging broken dependencies or replacing your whole desktop environment to avoid a bug when there’s a much simpler solution.
It’s those kinds of pifalls that lead to the extreme reactions you sometimes see from people who claim Linux is too complicated or broken or unreliabile or not ready. People run into a small issue and google search or ai tells them how to use a gun and they shoot themselves in the foot with it.
Many distros have pretty comprehensive and up to date wikis (Arch and Debian for example). LLMs have a lot of out of date info as well, even the big proprietary ones. I can see how they might help a newcomer though, with how bad search engines are now (ironically, a lot of the problems are from AI generated articles SEO’d to hell).
I may get some heat here but installing LM Studio, (think a personally hosted chat gpt), has helped me far more than any online forum due to the sheer amount of outdated linux information. I highly suggest hosting a model and using it for most of your questions.
I know this doesn’t help other people with similar issues, but I likely would have stopped using linux without it.
I do think ai tools can be really good for this! They often do a good job of explaining why to do things and allowing for follow-up questions, rather than just what to do, and what the manual says.
The one thing to be careful of is that they also sometimes give those outdated or unnecessary answers, just like the web does. It’s worth asking the same thing a few times and maybe doing a web search for their suggestions to double check (it can still be better than just trying to search through forums, stack overflow and archwiki yourself without knowing exactly what to search for and which things apply to you).
Sometimes beginners in Linux fall into rabbit holes following ai instructions or online tutorials that suggest huge complex things like manually compiling and repackaging broken dependencies or replacing your whole desktop environment to avoid a bug when there’s a much simpler solution.
It’s those kinds of pifalls that lead to the extreme reactions you sometimes see from people who claim Linux is too complicated or broken or unreliabile or not ready. People run into a small issue and google search or ai tells them how to use a gun and they shoot themselves in the foot with it.
Many distros have pretty comprehensive and up to date wikis (Arch and Debian for example). LLMs have a lot of out of date info as well, even the big proprietary ones. I can see how they might help a newcomer though, with how bad search engines are now (ironically, a lot of the problems are from AI generated articles SEO’d to hell).