Agreed 100%! I got some Steam games that didn't run well (or at all) to run smoothly thanks to AI, after having spent hours trying to figure it out on my own (months prior), fix some issues with HiDPI and external monitor with my laptop, and now I have a tiny shell script that basically runs `checkupdates` (`checkupdates | claude -p`, roughly) and looks online for potential issues. I've been using Linux for many years but still Claude and ChatGPT helped me a ton.

My laptop resumed from sleep all too often and Claude found and fixed it within minutes. Now I still need to file that bug report though...

I used Claude & Gemini extensively to troubleshoot Linux since I switched last year, and it's been mostly great. But then it nearly bricked my install last week and I had to get some human help. I was getting black screens during and after boot and tried many suggestions from multiple AI's. After many hours it turns out I just needed to power cycle my monitor. Shout out to Claude for suggesting that (its memory remembered that I have a dock built in to my primary display).

I am still very happy with my switch to Linux. But if I didn't have the AI help I would say linux is still unacceptable platform for those not willing, able, and excited to get their hands very dirty.

I’ve been playing with the ITS operating system on a simulated PDP-10. Despite it being from the 1960s, Claude has been able to do sysadmin work on it, including a very similar journey where it started disassembling code to identify the source of an obscure problem. I don’t want to take away from the learning experience (the whole reason I’m interested in this stuff), but it’s often almost impossible to find what I’m looking for online, and the LLM turns out to be a better resource when I want to learn how a particular subsystem works. I ended up making a custom MCP server so it could connect to the simulator more efficiently. https://github.com/masto/pidp10-mcp

Drifted off my point a bit, which I guess was meant to be it’s not necessarily Linux-specific training.

I got Claude to set up 5.1 Surround Streaming from my Linux Desktop to my Steam Deck using Moonlight. It needed some help (or really human ears) to make sure things were coming from the right speakers - but it was pretty much a one-shot.

Yes this might be a bit too noob linux but I have the AIs maintaining an env.md + logs / updates on that md whenever they change anything about the env. Even things as simple as getting tmux to be fast, they do an excellent job at.

Drivers, Coding environment setup etc. are great too and it's nice to have everything logged so the next (more powerful) agent can come and improve the thing once in a while.

Fully agree. There is so much customization that I'm doing thanks to LLMs that I just wouldnt to bother to do by myself.

Is that specific to Linux? For better or worse, I have felt like it'd fairly good at working through most tech stacks I throw at it.

I have a client app on a very old (for the JS world) version of eleventy using NetlifyCMS (also outdated). Claude has quite easily picked that up to add features to it along the way.

I used Claude to build an entire runbook for how to build my Linux desktop up from scratch to its current state, including all my installed software, configs, hacks, workarounds, etc. Then I used it to migrate from one laptop to another in an afternoon. Now it keeps itself up to date.

Nice idea, then they want to make a quick little kernel module, oops, you secure booted, this is not your system, can't load...

Since LLMs have been so successful at finding exploits it's been clearer than ever that the people so obsessed with enshittifying every system with ineffective (other than pissing you off and wasting your time) "secure boot" functionality were really just too ignorant to succeed at actual novel security work, so they focused on this make believe crap. Well, glad that's over.