[Grombobulous]

I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.

I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.

[ipdashc]

> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude

I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?

I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me

[mwwaters]

The Windows 11 ISO on a two year old Lenovo laptop did not have the Ethernet or WiFi driver. “Have Disk” also did not work for whatever reason when I downloaded the driver to a USB drive. I had to open up a command prompt within the Windows installer and run the GUI driver installer.

In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).

[jcastro]

> what did Claude help them with?

https://askubuntu.com/

There's decades of this stuff.

[pletnes]

Conversely, my windows 11 has fundamental issues that neither google nor claude can find solutions to.

[lostlogin]

I wonder if AI recommends regular full reinstalls?