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johnisgoodyesterday at 6:52 PM3 repliesview on HN

I would have never become a power user of Linux were I used LLM to do the installation of Gentoo once upon a time. :( So do you guys not know much about the distro you are using, or how does this work? I honestly thought your comment was sarcasm, but apparently it is not.


Replies

TheAceOfHeartsyesterday at 8:55 PM

Well, there's layers. When I started using nixOS I read through the guide and wiki but I also used LLM assistance to help create a stable starting point. Then over time I've incrementally added new things to my configuration through a mix of LLM assistance and reading online material.

I think the initial migration towards nixOS is the hardest point, since it requires learning a bunch of new things all at once in order to get the system into a usable state that matches your expectations and preferences. The key benefit of using an LLM is that it makes it really easy to get your system into a useful initial state, and then you can safely learn and experiment incrementally with a mix of tools.

When I started off I didn't understand everything, but at this point I feel I have a very good understanding of everything in my configuration file.

hombre_fatalyesterday at 7:01 PM

NixOS is high-level declarative, so you're reading high-level config diffs when the AI agent is pitching changes.

Unless you're brand new to Linux or computing, it's not a mystery what a given nix config change is ever doing.

You can probably guess what this does:

    networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 8080, 9000 ];
The things to know about the OS are high level things. The rest of its idiosyncrasies you learn just in time through daily exposure like anything else.
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Thanemateyesterday at 10:10 PM

I'm glad that I'm not the only one. I don't want to move from "Microsoft knows best" to "Claude knows best but hey, at least you review the output by looking up the not so good documentation".