Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bonoboTP 105 days ago
Ubuntu may have issues, but at least the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish. This is effort but we are in a thread discussing the problem of opaque errors and the impossibility of troubleshooting. Yes troubleshooting is tinkering. It is effortful and nerdy and sweaty, not slick and effortless.
1 comments
nottorp 105 days ago
> the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish

I don't know. There's a lot of friction like gnome hiding or removing configuration options, kde becoming a third class citizen, different packaging systems every 2 years... app stores being pushed instead of apt-get install...

The command line and server side stuff is fine of course, I wouldn't dream of running anything but linux for that.

link
bonoboTP 105 days ago
True, snap annoys me as well, but it's possible to switch packages to apt. And it's just going to get easier to customize using AI agents.
link
nottorp 105 days ago
Tried late last year to set up a new linux server with the help of "AI". Unfortunately it couldn't decide what distribution it's talking about in spite of me specifying it in the prompt. And when it got it right it mixed LTS Ubuntu versions.

So... i don't know about "AI". Might have to still write the config files by hand.

link
bonoboTP 105 days ago
People have widely different experiences regarding this. All I can say is that Claude is working great for me for doing drudgery sysadmin stuff but I'm also somewhat experienced in these things and that helps in telling it specifically what I want. I think it depends on what model you tried, but also I know people are tired of being told that it's about the model or skill issue, so I'll just note that this is your experience and I'll just carry on living my own experience which is working well.
link
nottorp 105 days ago
Sysadmin as a day job I'm not. Being able to bring up a kernel on a rev 0 arm board doesn't make me an expert in apache configuration :)

And linux on the server works well enough that I decided to replace the home box only after like 10 years, so I'm not even sure what services I need to migrate, and the safe option is to start from a clean slate and redo all the configuration from scratch.

Probably don't remember what questions to ask. Or if i should dump apache and install nginx instead.

link