I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.
I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.
medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude
I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?
I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me
Linux Desktops are having a moment this year, but there are still all sorts of sharp edges that a user has to navigate.
Getting a laptop to properly hibernate such that the battery life is usable on the road is a whole roll-your-own-adventure.
WirePlumber apparently mis-classifies some headphones resulting in only input or output working in web meetings.
I've worked with Linux on the server side for over 20 years and these were just two Fedora issues that LLMs helped me sort out recently. If I had to spend a whole day debugging these items, I would likely be drifting back towards macOS or WSL2.
Getting Linux installed has always been the "easy" part. It's everything after that in daily operations that has been hard.
The Windows 11 ISO on a two year old Lenovo laptop did not have the Ethernet or WiFi driver. “Have Disk” also did not work for whatever reason when I downloaded the driver to a USB drive. I had to open up a command prompt within the Windows installer and run the GUI driver installer.
In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).
Mostly it was needed to help with stuff like making install USBs and helping with disk partitioning.
Like I said, this person is not really technical.
I don’t consider it a very bad thing in the sense that it’s not high friction to have to ask a question.
Also, more and more preinstalled options are available as time goes on. You can just order a framework laptop and have it come preinstalled with Ubuntu and everything will be working. You can buy a Steam Machine or Steam Deck and they have Linux preinstalled.
This reminds me of how my journey from Windows 11 to CachyOS on my gaming desktop happened because of something like this.
I started getting driver crashes in certain games with my AMD 9070XT graphics card. Everything I tried didn’t work: DDU, reinstall, settings changes, etc.
I don’t know if it was AMD or Microsoft’s fault, but I don’t really care, because everything is more stable on Linux and I’ve been able to run 100% of what I want to run.
Comments
I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.
I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.
I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?
I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me
https://askubuntu.com/
There's decades of this stuff.
Linux Desktops are having a moment this year, but there are still all sorts of sharp edges that a user has to navigate.
Getting a laptop to properly hibernate such that the battery life is usable on the road is a whole roll-your-own-adventure.
WirePlumber apparently mis-classifies some headphones resulting in only input or output working in web meetings.
I've worked with Linux on the server side for over 20 years and these were just two Fedora issues that LLMs helped me sort out recently. If I had to spend a whole day debugging these items, I would likely be drifting back towards macOS or WSL2.
Getting Linux installed has always been the "easy" part. It's everything after that in daily operations that has been hard.
The Windows 11 ISO on a two year old Lenovo laptop did not have the Ethernet or WiFi driver. “Have Disk” also did not work for whatever reason when I downloaded the driver to a USB drive. I had to open up a command prompt within the Windows installer and run the GUI driver installer.
In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).
Mostly it was needed to help with stuff like making install USBs and helping with disk partitioning.
Like I said, this person is not really technical.
I don’t consider it a very bad thing in the sense that it’s not high friction to have to ask a question.
Also, more and more preinstalled options are available as time goes on. You can just order a framework laptop and have it come preinstalled with Ubuntu and everything will be working. You can buy a Steam Machine or Steam Deck and they have Linux preinstalled.
Conversely, my windows 11 has fundamental issues that neither google nor claude can find solutions to.
This reminds me of how my journey from Windows 11 to CachyOS on my gaming desktop happened because of something like this.
I started getting driver crashes in certain games with my AMD 9070XT graphics card. Everything I tried didn’t work: DDU, reinstall, settings changes, etc.
I don’t know if it was AMD or Microsoft’s fault, but I don’t really care, because everything is more stable on Linux and I’ve been able to run 100% of what I want to run.
I wonder if AI recommends regular full reinstalls?
It’s like this on a fresh install too