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LTT does another Linux Challenge (www.youtube.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 14 points 8 months ago (6 children)

At the same time Linus is making questionable choices at best. Asking ChatGPT for distro advice may be the "normie" thing to do right now (although I'm not too sure about that), but it's not the smart thing to do and it did lead him down a bad path.

I mean that’s kinda the point. They’re noobs, they don’t know what’s right from wrong. People who don’t know right from wrong are likely to go down the wrong path.

IMO Linux’s biggest issue with normal people uptake is choice. Normal people don’t want 7000 options. It also makes diagnosing problems all the more harder.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

    I mean that’s kinda the point. They’re noobs, they don’t know what’s right from wrong. People who don’t know right from wrong are likely to go down the wrong path.

    Ok. But that's a personal problem, not a Linux problem. In the end of the day if you're relying on "listicles" and LLMs to make basic decisions for you (for just about anything, frankly) you're going to have a bad time.

    PopOS is a bad and outdated recommendation right now, because they have literally just switched to Cosmic, a brand new desktop environment that just came out of beta a few months ago. I would argue that it should still be in beta right now, and I do think that System76 made a mistake by calling the current version 1.0, but in the end of the day ChatGPT predictably gave Linus a bad recommendation, because that's what LLMs do.

    If you go to ChatGPT for tech advice, legal advice, medical advice, or even something as computationally friendly as solving math problems, you're probably making a mistake. That's an "AI" problem, not a "Linux" problem. Use your brain and stop relying on "AI" to think for you.

    IMO Linux’s biggest issue with normal people uptake is choice. Normal people don’t want 7000 options. It also makes diagnosing problems all the more harder.

    I disagree. Choice and competition is generally good, as it means that different kinds of people with different use cases can have their needs met.

    IMO Windows' biggest issue is the lack of choice, in the sense that computers are treated as one-size-fits-all systems where your grandma is expected to use the same computing environment as a professional software developer, which ultimately leads to a system that's not ideal for either of them. Why are we gaming on the same OS that people at the tire store are running? Would we be surprised to find that is holding computing back?

    In the end of the day, choice is good, lack of choice is bad.

    People have 7000 choices of food, but it doesn't stop most people from finding something to eat for breakfast. People have 7000 choices for transportation, but it doesn't stop them from getting where they need to go in a way that suits them.

    It's not hard to get a good recommendation of what Linux distro to use today if you just ask someone who knows what they're talking about.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    What are you on about? People absolutely do get decision paralysis choosing what to eat or what car or bicycle to buy. And those come with budget constraints. The trouble with Linux distros is that you can afford literally any of them!

    You're looking at this as a power user. Normies don't want to have to make decisions.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Sorry but, what you you on about?

    Being free and open source is literally the entire premise and the most important "feature" of the Linux ecosystem: it will almost always be free (as in beer), and there will always be a lot of good choices. You're probably never going to convince me that computers would be better off if we had to spend more money with fewer options.

    People keep making this point, but to be perfectly honest it's a dumb one because it's the nature of the beast. OK, let's say for the sake of argument that there's too many distros out there, so now what?

    None of this changes the fact that going to ChatGPT for advice (on pretty much any topic) is a bad idea. It doesn't have thoughts or opinions, it doesn't know that (for better or worse) Cosmic just shipped 1.0 a few months ago. It recommended him PopOS because it does nothing other than regurgitate old information scraped from the internet.

    Its' like... If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who's the idiot? I am.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Mate, you don't need to convince me that choice is good. I've used as daily drivers, among others, Debian and several of its' derivatives, Arch, Gentoo and openSUSE (I'm not going to bother checking the capitalization on that despite the fact that I'm literally using it to write this comment).

    Linus went through the type of journey a normie would. Look at articles aimed at uninformed people, or ask an LLM. Because normies are uninformed. Hell, most normies don't WANT to be informed. You know what everyone in my social circles that knows what a package manager or desktop environment even is, has in common? They're all tech enthusiasts or professionals working in tech, usually both.

    The goal of the video, IMO, is to find out if a completely-new-to-Linux user has a good journey in 2026 or not. Part of it IS choosing your first distro, and that is at this point the absolute hardest thing for a newcomer. And it is in fact still quite common for beginners to pick Pop!_OS because it's been so heavily recommended in recent years (I'm talking last 5, not last year or 2) so there are still a ton of reddit threads and lists around.

    Its’ like… If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who’s the idiot? I am.

    Most people also consider investments to be a lot higher risk than picking an OS/distro, so a normal person wouldn't blindly trust ChatGPT like that for something so important, I'd hope. But there's definitely idiots that will do that too.

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