this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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As much as I hate to endorse an AI (and I'm going to get hella down voted for it)..it's one of the few actual good uses for it...
You can ask plain questions, copy\paste error codes, and it will actually walk you through fixing problems like a non-judgy person would. ;-)
Perplexity is my go-to when I'm troubleshooting something I can't figure out.
"How do I open and edit a word document in Linux?" Is a perfectly acceptable question to ask, things like that.used it when I was building this server to work through some concepts I wasn't familiar with.
I had been using duck.ai for a while and found it to be a frustrating experience. Switched to free Claude and ended up with way better answers and a better experience overall. Still made a couple mistakes, but not nearly as many as duck. My only complaint is the limitation on the length of the sessions for the free version.
How is perplexity in that dept?
So far I've found it to be Pretty good.. I do pay the $20/month "pro" membership but I'm pretty sure most months I cost them money. ;-)
What drew me to perplexity is that it will give you footnotes on basically every statement so you can go read the reference material it pulled from. Not foolproof, but lets you see if it's quoting an idiot or not... ;-)
What I most use it for is debugging. You can just copy/paste trace files or logs into it and it will read the log like a book and tell you exactly what's happening.
That shit's $20 per month? What the hell, that would be my third most expensive monthly payment behind rent and internet.