If you think a quarter of a billion laptops added to landfill in the coming months is a bad idea, please see how you can help via @Endof10
@steltenpower @Endof10 With tools such as Claude and ChatGPT to help, running a linux machine is truly a no-brainer. For example I wanted to OCR a load of documents. I was on my #nicos Linux machine. Had no Adobe. Just installed the required app & ran a command line script to do the whole lot.... a dream. I think Linux + AI is now vastly more powerful than Windows will ever be. WARNING: SEE BELOW!!! If you do not understand anything at all about command line or computing do not use AI blindly.

@adingbatponder @steltenpower @Endof10 this is frankly terrible advice. The failures of large language models are infrequent, but they've got an exponential distribution of impacts. If you're using Linux by relying on AI to handle a lot of terminal stuff, you'll eventually end up doing something horrible like deleting a bunch of important documents or screwing up the graphics configuration.

I know I sound like a crusty old curmudgeon here, and I know learning terminal stuff yourself is painful, *especially* in the current age where AI-generated SEO spam poisons search results. But I promise you if you try to vibe-code your way through Linux, you are going to suffer and regret it. I'd estimate max 6 months to a year of daily use with AI commands going into your terminal before you experience a disaster. If you're Ajay knowledgeable about the terminal and try to be careful, you can probably double or triple that.

To address the obvious reply: yes, you can easily screw stuff up yourself without AI, but the difference is that you'll be learning from those mistakes and most will be recoverable given the knowledge you'll be gaining.

@tiotasram @steltenpower @Endof10 The advice was based on using #nixos which is designed to be a reproducible build with rollback also. It also uses nix shell and nix developer to protect the OS from bad commands and installs. I agree that shoving lots of command line commands into a normal system if u don't know what they do will cause a problem in linux eventually. My example was a simple script to run a program in files in a directory. Just automation but amazingly easy.

@tiotasram @adingbatponder @steltenpower @Endof10 I agree.

Stolen from a comment on #hackernews, paraphrased: Using AI for knowledge work is like bringing a forklift to the gym.

Of course you will be done faster. But that is not the point of the exercise.