Recently, I was walking a friend through the process of switching from Windows 11 to Linux, as he was increasingly hearing about the ecosystem from friends and had grown tired of Microsoft’s positioning of Windows in recent years. As I was walking him through the process, he showed me his ChatGPT history, already complete with an entire walkthrough of what distro he should choose, what applications would work, and how to make the switch. I became very curious: just how accurate are these instructions? Can someone actually completely make the switch without ever touching a search engine? To find out, I decided to play the part of a beginner, and ask ChatGPT myself.
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The initial prompt
Approaching with a beginners mindset
Even as someone who has a fair amount of experience with Linux as a platform, both in a desktop and server deployment, I still get stuck sometimes. I’ve spent more hours than I can count scouring Stack Overflow for answers to my terminal woes, but in terms of the beginner stuff like choosing a distro and going through the installation process for the first time, I don’t have any questions.
To make this as accurate as possible, I’ve started a completely fresh chat with ChatGPT 5.2, and turned memory off completely, so it can’t pull from any previous conversations. I’m also going to approach this as a complete newbie to Linux: I know that distros are basically different “flavors”, but I have no other context for them. My inital prompt was the following:
Looking past the quirky tone and emojis, the initial response is pretty helpful. It laid out my requirements and offered a distro choice, which was Linux Mint. I found it curious that it didn’t give me a list to choose from, but instead just a singular choice. This is probably a good move, as giving a ton of different options right from the outset may be overwhelming to a complete beginner. I did ask it for other suggestions, and it provided options with valid descriptions.
It then suggested alternative applications for editing PSD files, like GIMP, Krita, and Photopea, all of which have merit. For video editing, it only suggested DaVinci Resolve, which is fine, but I would’ve liked to have seen Kdenlive suggested.
It addressed gaming, saying that Linux gaming is “VERY” good now, and mentioned Proton. It did give a disclaimer that some “anti-cheat multiplayer games may not work” but didn’t give any examples. Gaming on Linux is certainly doable now, but the blanket statement of “VERY good” isn’t how I would describe it overall.
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The installation process
It got everything mostly correct
After confirming my specs, I asked it to walk me through how to perform the installation. Everything to this point had been pretty accurate, so I was interested to see how it would handle giving specific installation instructions. It walked me through how to download the ISO and flash it with Rufus, which was all well and good, but it was under the impression that the latest release for Linux Mint is 21.3, which is actually quite a bit behind the current latest version of 22.3. Regardless, I just went with the latest version.
The installation instructions are quite surface level, but I think a beginner could follow them well enough. I was a bit disappointed to see a lack of a disclaimer about dual-booting; it’s incredibly common to have Windows updates bork your Linux bootloader, and fixing that can be a big pain. It does mention to reconfigure the boot order in the BIOS, but doesn’t describe exactly how to do that. I tried giving it a friendly hint by asking “is my Windows install still safe” but it just reaffirmed what it had suggested previously.
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Post-install setup
Good suggestions overall
After the initial install finished, I asked it what’s next, and it emphatically congratulated me on adopting the “Linux life”, which I found amusing. It suggested running full system updates through the Update Manager, which is a good suggestion, and then it suggested opening the Terminal and installing GameMode and MangoHud, which are both reasonable installs for a Linux gaming rig. Mint will give an option to install media codecs during the initial install, so suggesting them here is also good, as users could’ve missed that step during the setup process. The suggestions to set up fractional scaling, Timeshift, and Lutris are all great suggestions that I have no issues with as well.
I tried asking it about why .exe files don’t work, which is a common question for complete beginners, and it gave what I would consider a satisfactory answer, and pointed me in the right direction.
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Overall, I’m impressed
All-in-all, if you have no experience with Linux at all, you can get safely up and running using the guidance of an LLM. At least with ChatGPT 5.2, the suggestions for distro made sense based on my needs, and the setup instructions were straightforward enough for a novice to follow. I was disappointed that it didn’t give any warning about Windows potentially messing up GRUB, but besides that, I would have no problem using its suggestions for my system day-to-day.
