Comment by himata4113

7 hours ago

Following some of the comments about switching to linux the big one that enabled it for me is AI. I love to thinker, but sometimes I just want things to work and linux is known for very minor inconveniences that are pain to alter because you have to learn what kind of god forsaken build system the application uses and how it integrates with the desktop environment, but now I can just ask AI and it will be fixed by the time I want to use that feature.

Another big thing is getting lookingglass working. I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong when I followed the setup guide 1 line at a time, but AI figured out the problem and it it working in 1 hour. And yes it took AI one hour to figure it out so you can assume how long I've sent trying to get this to work.

Now I run a custom kernel with custom KDE and several compiled new packages which would require the effort of a small team, but now it's possible to do with few prompts and it's relatively easy to maintain indefinitely.

Also AI got me off jetbrains onto nvim and I haven't been this happy writing code.

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himata4113

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stillpointlab  4 hours ago

Same experience here. I've dabbled with Linux Desktop in the past but always backed out once I encountered the rough edges. Just because everything is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend a couple of hours on each of the 100 paper cuts. It adds up over time and feels never-ending.

But now, I just open Claude Code and say "this is bothering me" and it runs in the background while I complete other tasks. I get it to document anything it changes and push my custom configs into a private git repo along with my dot files.

In some sense, I'm starting to see Linux almost like a Smalltalk image. Anything permanent is backed up to git and I have documented recipes to go from fresh-install to custom environment in a couple of hours.

There are still a lot of rough edges all over the place but it is a totally workable environment.

  • exitb  4 hours ago

    You would love NixOS.

    • stillpointlab  4 hours ago

      I think you are right. Right now I'm on Fedora because I asked the LLM for the most boring and reliable Linux distro for doing development. I'm at the point in my life that I prefer stability to many other attributes - I like boring tech and Fedora is boring.

      I'm waiting to see if Omarchy switches to NixOS for their next major release. I have ~100GB of unpartitioned space ready for experimentation and NixOS is the most likely candidate.

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