I do think ai tools can be really good for this! They often do a good job of explaining why to do things and allowing for follow-up questions, rather than just what to do, and what the manual says.

The one thing to be careful of is that they also sometimes give those outdated or unnecessary answers, just like the web does. It’s worth asking the same thing a few times and maybe doing a web search for their suggestions to double check (it can still be better than just trying to search through forums, stack overflow and archwiki yourself without knowing exactly what to search for and which things apply to you).

Sometimes beginners in Linux fall into rabbit holes following ai instructions or online tutorials that suggest huge complex things like manually compiling and repackaging broken dependencies or replacing your whole desktop environment to avoid a bug when there’s a much simpler solution.

It’s those kinds of pifalls that lead to the extreme reactions you sometimes see from people who claim Linux is too complicated or broken or unreliabile or not ready. People run into a small issue and google search or ai tells them how to use a gun and they shoot themselves in the foot with it.