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How do you debug system issues on Linux?
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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journalctl and log files are very valuable. If it's specific to an application running said application in a terminal with verbose also gives can potentially provide you with a clear indication of what's going wrong.
I'm dyslexic so I get syntax errors all the damn time and thankfully using NixOS it likes to remind me on rebuild how much of an idiot I am.
Worse comes to worse you can always plug the error into an LLM like Claude or Chatgpt. But take that with a grain of salt. It'll give you a good base to start from for debugging but never trust something like Claude that will constantly tell you "it's a known issue" when it isn't.
All this being said I've had the best experience for help via whatever application/distro/whatever IRC channels on Libera chat.
There's an entire step between trying to figure it out yourself and resorting to an LLM which is probably likely to tell you to shove cheese into the USB ports. Regular web searching. Forum and social media posts. The distro's wiki itself or other such resources. You know, the stuff the AI originally sucked up, mashed together, mixed around, and spat back out.
right that's why I said worse comes to worse and to take it with a grain of salt. For very simple issues it's fine, beyond that it's a coin toss. It's a fine rubber duck. Like if I missed something obvious but I'm just not seeing it then it might point that out for me. Like for example I recently reinstalled my OS and I couldn't get wireguad to work so as a last ditch effort I plugged it into Claude and it told me that I had forgotten to replace a privatekey on one of the peers. I had just completely missed it.