Codex is my Linux Janitor

I love Linux, but historically it has a reputation of being not very friendly to normies, and requiring you to drop down into a terminal and debug stuff a lot. Supposedly these days it's a lot better than it used to be, but in my experience there are still plenty of paper cuts and weird flaky behavior that I've just put up with.

Recently, though, I've liberated myself from this state by just asking Codex to fix the issues whenever they pop up. And it just does it. Maybe this sounds obvious, but oh man, it feels like walking with a pebble in your shoe for years and then finally taking it out. It's like having a permanent mechanic for your computer on standby.

Here are a few of the things I've fixed for myself:

• For as long as I've had this computer, my AirPods Max have been EXTREMELY spotty on Bluetooth. Sometimes they would just refuse to connect; sometimes they would connect but be stuck in HFP profile, where the quality sucks ass; and sometimes they would connect and work properly with A2DP as I want. It seemed to be completely random, and any time I connected the headphones, I'd have to cross my fingers and pray that I wouldn't have to spend a 20-minute fiddling session just to get them to work. Codex found that I had 2 competing daemons, BlueALSA and PipeWire, that were somehow screwing each other up. Since I'm not using BlueALSA, it just killed it. And now my headphones work. Glory glory hallelujah. This one above all others made me want to kiss this soulless clanker. I won't even mind when it turns me into paperclips.

• I have an Elgato capture card, and found that if you put the machine to sleep while an application is using it, it borks the driver and won't work until you restart the machine. Codex cloned the Linux source, fixed the bug in the capture card driver, and built/loaded a kernel module with the fix. I attempted to upstream the patch, and Hans Verkuil very warmly and helpfully responded with feedback. I just need to find some time to incorporate his suggestions and send a new patchset.

• I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and when doing anything CPU intensive, it would throttle the cores down to sub-1 GHz, killing performance. Codex found throttled and got it set up, bumping up perf hugely during these scenarios.

• When taking screenshots with xfce4-screenshooter, sometimes the system would get into a state where it wouldn't save screenshots to the clipboard. You'd hit OK and then the screenshot would just be gone for good. I used to just have to restart my machine to fix this. Codex isolated the issue and then made a script I can run to dislodge things and make it start working again. I was too lazy to dig further and maybe patch the actual program, so this works for now.

• I was using z80-mode for Emacs, which is a minor mode for Z80 assembly. When I updated to Emacs 30, it stopped working mysteriously. Codex found that it was calling some deprecated function and fixed it.

• Not quite Linux, but I run my site on OpenBSD and MediaWiki. Historically, it's quite annoying and tedious to update those, since they want you to step through each intermediate version (and fix up config files that need updating after each upgrade, restarting each time), so I just put it off and was running stuff from 2024. When php2shell came out, I gave Codex access to the VPS, cracked open a cold one, and when I came back, I was on the latest OpenBSD and MediaWiki.

I think there were others, but these were the ones I found in my session history. Honestly, I wonder if the year of the Linux desktop could be brought about just by distros having a user-friendly janitor agent that sits and fixes random shit like this as it pops up. I think the normies would love it.