I don’t think using AI as a replacement for Stackoverflow counts as vibe coding.

Linux is tough. Stackoverflow was shitty and hostile.

Don’t beat yourself up about it.

Get a raspberry pi, use termux on your phone, or just a old scrap PC and just start playing with it in a way you wouldnt feel comfortable on your home enviorment.

Break the damn thing and reinstall it to do it again. Pick a weird project like setting up your own server, or making a emulation station.

You can use Ai or not, just make sure its something you’re a little passionate about. I think you will notice you picked up a lot more basic info than you realized, and being in a enviorment where you are encouraged to break things as the learning experience ususally helps you not get as fusterated.

Listen I am the most anti Ai guy I know. But you have to really go out of the way to avoid using Ai these days, and I’m not going to fault someone for using google search and gemeni is the default. Especially when someone like you is fully cognatively aware of the results. I take hardstances against Ai, but you almost have to, just to kind of counter the narrative. There is a lot more nuance on local open source models, and what could be, but that is not where the battle is right now, and not where the conversation needs to be at this moment.

I think what’s the most important for just you as a person is to be learning to be self sufficient in everyway possible at any cost. If that means using Ai then by all means. Learn to fix your car, make a raspberry pi ai camera that detects flock cameras and points a green laser at them, just get out there and put yourself through the motions.

Pretty soon ai is going to act more or less as the DRM for what used to be free information on the internet. The internet is kind of already reframing itself to be Ai centric, and sooner rather than later you are going to have to be a turbo virgin just to access what used to be normal websites. I can’t access reddit without logging in and providing a ID, and over half of my google results point at reddit.

This post could be from 2016 and titled “How to be less reliant on stackexchange”. Suffice to say, our ambition to do stuff on our computers sometimes outruns our technical acumen. I built up my own skillset by just furiously searching through forum posts trying to find the one post where someone had the exact command I needed. I’ve copy and pasted a lot of shit into the terminal without understanding what it really did.

I think there’s a couple things you should do to help build up your own brainpower:

1. Don’t copy and paste stuff into the CLI, actually physically type it out. The contours of the command will actually touch your brain.
2. Just think about stuff. Give yourself like 45 seconds to think about how you would do something before you ask the AI chatbot. When the AI chatbot is giving you answers, actually read through them and think about whether they make sense.

RTFM (Read the friendly manual). Theres the arch wiki that has pages on most any system component thats probably common across 90% of distributions. Theres project websites, YouTube videos, other wikis like the Debian wiki or Gentoo wiki. Theres peoples blogposts where they talk about cool things they did.

For example:

• https://ubuntu.com/desktop/docs/en/latest/tutorial/the-linux-command-line-for-beginners/

Try looking for holistic sources of information basically rather than sifting through aggregators like LLMs or page rankings (which take you to listicles generated by LLMs).

Also post on c/libre if you have any software related questions (which should I use, etc).

you havne’t even grasped the scale of the things you don’t know

makes me feel like a fraud

cut that shit out. a fraud of being a 1 year linux user? get over yourself. it’s like a fraud of a thing you can be a fraud of.

use https://wiki.archlinux.org/ (even if you’re not running arch)

It really depends on what you want to do. Forum posts can be really useful. Also remember that most cli programs have man pages which are often excellent documentation. A lot of graphical applications also include documentation. Depending on your distro, you may be able to find documentation in /usr/doc.

Learn how to use grep and man

You can learn a lot when you actually read through the man pages, and usually there’s a pretty standard structure so grep works well if you know roughly what you’re trying to do.

Also following issue trackers and mailing lists can be helpful.

Edit: Also try out fish or nu. fish auto complete is amazing and embeds man info into the tab complete options (including flags and such). xonsh is kinda cool too if you are comfortable with Python, and less comfortable with bash.

Just a warning, don’t use these as your login shell, just run them from your distro’s shell when you want to switch over.

I prefer to use official docs, if available, e.g. --help, man pages, GNU info, /usr/share/doc, official website. The official documentation is usually more correct and more comprehensive than other resources, though sometimes a bit technical. Other than that, the arch wiki (and I’m using Debian) is a good place to look.

If I’m seeing an error, I find it’s most useful to collect as much information as possible. If it’s a GUI program, you’ll need to start it in a terminal, it’ll likely spam errors and warnings to stderr. Many programs have -v or --verbose or --debug options, or a debug mode that can be enabled in the configuration file. Look at the logs if there are any (usually through journalctl these days). It’s sometimes already obvious what the problem is just from the log/stderr output, but if not then just paste it into Google.

Also, official bugtrackers are good. When I encounter a bug in a package, I go to the Debian bugtracker first, and almost always someone has already reported it, and left useful information there.

There’s two ways of going about things. Copy pasting without understanding which means you never learn. Or understanding what you’re being given to run to learn.

Ai, stack exchange, some docs if you are running stuff without trying to understand what its doing you won’t learn things. If you take the time to understand it then you’ll be fine. As much as i hate ai its rather good at giving you a quick explanation of what you’re doing. If you are relinquishing your judgement to ai then yeah you wont be learning anything.

I’ve been using linux for about 18 years now its not something you ever really stop learning your way around. What I tend to do is keep notes in Joplin when i figure out how to do something so I can come back later. Its been invaluable making my own docs for the stuff i need to do

Oh and then there’s the things you’ll never learn to do. Like tar and the find command. I never remember them, i dont know why but i just dont

just google stuff. but dont use google use ddg

I first got into Linux around 2021 and used google and cheat sheets for everything, all AI did was consolidate that

tbh i would never have learned anything in linux if i had been born 30 years later than i was

AI, in this case, is the new Google. Or stack overflow. Or whatever the cool kids were using.

I think as long as you’re asking how to do it and not just asking it to do it for you, you’re actually probably going to get a better learning experience using a modern LLM to learn stuff like this than almost any other resource other than a very experienced person walking you through it one on one