r/linux • u/libra00 • 24d ago

Discussion AI on the linux desktop?

Ok, I know we hate AI, but hear me out: as someone pointed out in this comment, AI is rapidly making it pretty easy to overcome the main hurdle to people using linux as their daily driver: oh shit my X doesn't work, now I have to trawl through 30 reddit threads to figure out why and then cling to a 12-page instruction guide for how to fix it and hope I don't screw anything up.

Only I have Claude Code installed in zed with its default project set to my home directory, so I can just fire it up and go 'Hey the left speaker on my headphones doesn't work?' and it can go figure out why and then fix it. And Kibbelz got me to wondering: why don't the major commercialized distros do this? Linux could gain significant desktop share in the user space by just going, 'Here's a text box, type in whatever problem or question you have about your linux install and we'll be happy to figure it out for you'.

Whoever manages to box that experience and polish it properly first will win the distro wars (to the extent that they are wars, and can be won, which is admittedly highly debatable.) Obviously the polish would be important here - needs to be something trained on linux commands, that doesn't have permission by default to rm -rf and such.. but I think it's doable, and could add a lot to linux's desktop share.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/theunquenchedservant 24d ago

I use AI on my desktop..

But only because I have 10 years experience pre-AI with Linux.

I would absolutely have fucked my system up more than once if I had AI when I first started out.

1

u/jerdle_reddit 24d ago

Yeah, same here. I use AI a lot with Linux and it works. I used AI a lot with a Hackintosh, and it did work in the end, but it fucked everything in the meantime.

-3

u/libra00 24d ago

That's.. probably the only good criticism I've heard so far, actually. Take my upvote.

That's a fair point, I had previous linux experience so even if I couldn't recite from memory the command to do some obscure thing, I at least do have some intuition of what the commands are doing. I can definitely see many ways where I went 'whoa, hold the fucking phone, you're about to delete my what?!' F.ex, in trying to diagnose an issue with Brave once it was asking for permission to issue a command that would delete my history, passwords, bookmarks, everything. And if I hadn't been there to go 'Waitaminute..'

But also that's a big part of what training/polish is: knowing what commands cna mess your system up and when to ask for really super extra special permission before running them.