Thread

1. taylorfinley · 1790799418 · focus · HN ↗

   Ten days ago I had an experience with Gemini 3.8 flash that made me wonder if I was being routed to a different model under test. I was trying to use rocm with llama.cpp on my 128gb Strix Halo but could only get it to run Vulkan. I pasted the error message into agy and it proceeded to attach GDB to my GPU driver, reverse-engineer the kernel queue ioctl interface, and author an LD_PRELOAD C shim to get ROCm llama.cpp working on my Strix Halo. My jaw was hanging open the whole time.

   Edit to add the fix: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;birep&#x2F;6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c351" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;birep&#x2F;6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c3...

   1. plasticchris · 1790816161 · focus · HN ↗

      This is why I think llms are a killer app for Linux desktop. They’ve been trained on Linux very hard, and it cleanly solves the “how do I make it do $thing” problem since everything is open and the llm can manipulate it. For example: Sound not working? Just tell the llm.

      1. samspot · 1790872960 · focus · HN ↗

         I used Claude &amp; Gemini extensively to troubleshoot Linux since I switched last year, and it&#x27;s been mostly great. But then it nearly bricked my install last week and I had to get some human help. I was getting black screens during and after boot and tried many suggestions from multiple AI&#x27;s. After many hours it turns out I just needed to power cycle my monitor. Shout out to Claude for suggesting that (its memory remembered that I have a dock built in to my primary display).

         I am still very happy with my switch to Linux. But if I didn&#x27;t have the AI help I would say linux is still unacceptable platform for those not willing, able, and excited to get their hands very dirty.

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