[Fizz43]

I highly doubt this. As someone who is pretty active in a lot of beginner linux communities its becoming the case that a lot issues are caused by users following LLM instructions and creating issues where there were none.

Example someone will want to configure something and the LLM will give them advice from the wrong distro thats 5 years out of date. If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins. Instead they go down a rabbit hole where an LLM feeds them worse and worse advice trying to fix the mountain of issues its building up.

[scrollop]

Don't doubt.

Tried Linux around 5 years ago - took many issues, had to learn various commands.

Tried again a few months ago and used various llms to configure everything well, troubleshoot etc

Eg when waking from standby and your mouse isn't working, do you want to troubleshoot and learn various commands over an hour or ask an llm and fix it within a few minutes?

When creating an on demand voice to text app for Linux do I learn various commands and dependencies etc that may take one/many days or use an llm to make it within 30 min?

No brainer

[machomaster]

> If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins.

Not minutes. In best case scenario it is hours, in worst it is years to infinity.

You are also not taking into account the survivorship bias. You only see people who couldn't fix their system with AI and need further help. But you are not seeing a huge number of beginners (recently a big influx of those), who were successful in fixing problems using AI the vast majority of time.

Nowadays, there is no good reason to use a simple Search engine to find solutions by manually browsing all the possible links. Just ask Phind/Perplexity/others to explain the problem, give the solution and provide verifiable links one can check to validate.

[Fizz43]

I search all the time. If I trusted the AI response i'd be coming away with the wrong answer more often than not. Why would that be a better outcome than spending an extra 30s to get reliable information? Perplexity IS a simple search engine. Its far simpler than google's engine.

[awesan]

It definitely depends but it's useful for me. In general I find AI pretty useful when you can do a guided search in which you are personally able to discard bad paths quickly before they start polluting the context too much. I have pretty beginner linux skills but I'm quite technical overall and have a decent BS detector, so it's been useful for me.