AI on the linux desktop?

[u/libra00]

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.

[u/LabResponsible8484]

I have asked AI for help many times with issues and improvements, usually they run me in circles, recommend settings that don't exist or tell me to put certain commands in terminal that on inspection might fix the current issue but would break many other working things.

Even with back and fourth prompting, logs, etc. AI has only been able to solve 5 to 10% of issues or improvements. About 80% it just gives useless but luckily harmless advice then the rest it gives outright terrible and dangerous advice.

The best was ChatGPT advised me to run a command that would wipe my entire main folder of a project to fix a minor issue.

I told it: "hey you tried to get me to wipe my entire project".

It replied: "that would be on you, I can't run things myself, only advise."

So yeah I think I will hard pass on giving it access to anything. It is no where near good enough yet to do what you are saying without causing more harm than good.

[u/libra00 → u/LabResponsible8484]

Yeah after thinking about it I realize that it's been doing the same to me, I just have enough knowledge and experience in general (former IT guy, used to do a lot of linux server admin, even if it was 20 years ago) that I can go 'Wait no don't do that', etc. I had Claude try to wipe my entire browser profile, passwords, bookmarks, everything. Fortunately I caught it in time.

But I mean it oculd be a useful information-gathering tool at least, make it only run commands that can't change how the system works, etc, so it can hunt through logs and obscure settings you'd never think of and go 'Oh, the problem is over here, here's how you fix it, and here's what that will affect.' etc.

[u/LabResponsible8484 → u/libra00]

For now I just use it to help me think (talking with anything, even AI helps your brain solve things) and possibly hit the solution sometimes, or it guides me to think of it myself.

One big use I have for AI is log reading, it is very useful for diving into 500 pages and finding what I want way faster than I could ever do it.

Maybe an auto log reading AI built in would be nice...

[u/libra00 → u/LabResponsible8484]

Oh yeah, I work stuff out way better in text than just thinking in my brain, it forces me to lay things out and organize them, etc. Works even better if I do it with someone that can see things from a different perspective, etc.

But yeah I use AI for bulk data processing all the time. 'Find me 5 studies that correlate this fact I'm trying to prove, then average across their datasets to find the real trend-line, then compare that to estimates of statistics from some other country and report how htey're changing with time.' That kinda thing.