What’s your point? “Don’t use Linux unless you are a professional user”?

Beginners have to begin somewhere and they need to get info from somewhere.

A lot of Linux UX is still at the level where it doesn’t give enough relevant information to a non-technical user in a way that the user can actually make an informed decision. That is the core problem.

Whether users get their wrong information from AI, Stackoverflow, random tutorials, Google, a friend or somewhere else hardly matters.

Take for example a look at the setup process of a Synology NAS. A 10yo can successfully navigate that process, because it’s so well done. We need more of that, especially for FOSS stuff.

Too much of Linux is built by engineers for engineers.

I totally agree with the rant, and a big issue is that the Linux community specifically consists to a large part of technicians and not users who then go full *surprised pikachu face* when they see a user who is not a technician.

But seriosly, how would a (to quote OP) “total beginner” know that AI is not a good place to look for help?

And, tbh, it sometimes does actually help. AI lies more often than it doesn’t, but it at least tries to help, which is more than I can say of most members of the Linux community.

I had an issue on Fedora 42 where the performance of my games would randomly be abysmal. One day I can play current AAA titles without issue on my Nvidia 4070, the next day I have to measure performance in “Seconds per Frame” even on 15yo indie titles. This issue only affects game started from Heroic, all other things I try including all debugging stuff works fine.

I’m not a new Linux user. I’m a developer and I’ve been using Linux for about 20 years. So I get to debugging, googling, reading bug reports, all that, and can’t find anything. I ask on StackExchange, Lemmy, even Reddit, no result. Most people are like “Works on my machine, noob”, and a handful people are like "I have the same issue and no solution.

So after a year or so I swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT. The first answer is correct: Heroic (and thus all proton/wine games it spawns) runs in Flatpak. Flatpak has its own version of the Nvidia drivers, and if that version doesn’t exactly match the OS driver version it falls back to software rendering. So if I do dnf update and it updates the Nvidia drivers this breaks my performance until I do flatpak update. I often ran flatpak update before dnf update and thus my performance sucked.

Yes, the majority of the answers I get from AI are lies. But without AI I would still not be able to game on my system.

AI is a tool, and for beginners its a tricky tool, because sometimes it works perfectly, but sometimes it totally messes everything up. The same holds true for pretty much any other source of information made for beginners. Before “Don’t paste AI commands into CLI” we had “Don’t paste stuff from Stackoverflow into CLI” and before that it was “Don’t paste stuff you found on Google into CLI”.

Kinda as evidenced by a lot of the other responses. Thanks for the affirmation!

The only evidence that OP irreparably nuked their hardware is ChatGPTs word.

The bigger issue ad hand is that everyone here is a noob when it comes to exotic hardware like SAS, and still everyone here thinks they are 1337 haxors enough to tell OP that they are a noob idiot.

Tbh, if OP asks for help here and there’s 49 comments of people being dicks and one that actually helps it might be worthwhile. But as it stands it’s 50 to 0, with nobody here beeing educated enough to know anything about the subject.

Did it occur to you that OP might be a total beginner who doesn’t know about the conventions on how to report issues and how to format posts?

I had a problem with Fedora 42, where the performance of my games would be fine one day and abysmal another day. Couldn’t find a pattern. I googled a ton, tried to debug myself, asked on reddit, stackexchange, the fedora forum and lemmy. I only got answers like “Works fine on my machine, noob” and “I have that problem too”. It only affected games running in proton on heroic, everything else was fine.

After about a year of on-and-off debugging and asking around, I swallowed my pride and asked ChatGPT.

First answer from that thing was correct: I had run dnf update without doing a flatpak update right afterwards. Turns out, flatpak has its own copy of Nvidia drivers and if the system driver is updated without the flatpak copy being updated, it falls back to software rendering. So the performance was crap until I did flatpak update the next time, and broke again when I ran dnf update.

I still haven’t found that in any documentation so far.

AI is crap more often than not, but it does at least try to help and sometimes it actually does.

Look in this thread here. Is there even a single answer that tries to help OP, or is every single answer here just dumb snark?

Can you blame them?

The manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).

Tutoral pages are overwhelmingly AI vomit too, but AI vomit from last year’s AI, so even worse than asking AI right now.

Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”

Look at this thread right now and count how many snarky bullshit answers are there that don’t even try to answer the question, how many answers like “I got no idea” are there and then how many actually helpful answers are here.

Can you really blame anyone who turns to AI, because that garbage at least sounds like it tries to help you?

No, that’s not the point of a platform like Lemmy, because you can do exactly that on a platform like Reddit too.

And stylizing fragmentation as something desireable is a pretty bad take.

In general, I really don’t like that style of argument. It’s like “No, you are not allowed to bring up negative points that can be improved, because you can instead just DIY the whole thing.”

Would you say the same when someone complains about an issue they have with their car? “If you don’t like your car’s entertainment system, you know, you could just build a car from scratch.”

It’s a stupid argument used by people who can’t stomach the concept that the tech thing they base their identity on isn’t seen as absolutely perfect by everyone.

Add to that that some major instances have disabled downvoting, which actively disables people’s ability to filter stuff like that by voting.

When you know which xkcd it is before you click it…

Doesn’t change the fact that they are in charge of dictating the choice of OS.

Until you accidentally delete the taskbar panel.

In a situation where someone doesn’t understand the implications and a corporation can make money of their misfortune. That pretty much describes most of social media.

Does Valve set the prices? I thought it was the publishers/developers/who ever manages the steam product listing.