Been a long time Debian user but with the recent AI decision I am planning on moving on so anyone have an anti-AI recommendations? I understand its being used in the kernel as well but are there any distros taking a full anti-AI approach to the parts of the code they control?
Since folks seem a little confused on what I am referring to here is the mailing list page regarding the use of gen ai without disclosure vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/08/msg00360.html
Phoronix article on it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Votes-Responsible-AI-Use
Please stop hyping up the power of text generators. LLMs are interesting, but far from the big scary boogeymen some people hype them as. The more afraid we are of them, the more power we are giving to them to actually control us.
It’s not due to them being a boogie man or not. LLMs have been created through the mass theft of others work and ethically I want no part of it. Asking for a distro without ai contribution is just doing what linux is best at. Providing choices to its users.
You are giving slop WAY too much power over your life, imo. Avoiding Linux entirely because you might accidentally touch some generated code is pathology.
Right? It’s hilarious how mentally ill these people are. It’s like being afraid of birds.
I’m no fan of slop but I’m not going to stab myself in the eyes to avoid looking at it
On the other hand: The more naive someone is, the more they’ll get manipulated and exploited. And ignoring problems doesn’t solve them either. It regularly makes everything even worse…
the other hand of what lol naive people have been getting manipulated since at least the 1970s long before LLMs
And that’s okay from your perspective?
You cannot tell from the code necessarily anyway so anti-AI policies are hard to enforce. In the end the developer (or AI wielding human) is responsible for the code quality and its license which is what matters. All this discussion feels just like the usually culture war dividing the community. I’m more concerned about the intentions of people adding fuel to the fire.
Linus himself said the linux project is not anti AI and if you dont want AI in Linux, fork it.
just fork it bro, what a disingenuous argument for a codebase with 40+ million lines of low-level code
I you are ready to make an exception for the Linux kernel you might as well make an exception for the Debian distribution which is the basis of a lot of stuff.
Gentoo, but I think this isn’t the end of the world that you think. I don’t like AI but as others said, think Debian will do something at least reasonable. Also, I think there is a distinction between LLMs/AI and the crap companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, etc.
be mad but at the right thing
Gentoo gang rise up!
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Gentoo?
I’m not sure why you think Debian is embracing AI
They took a nuteral stance on it
I wouldn’t call that neutral. Allowing it with no disclosure sounds like embracing but trying to hide it.
I am probably gonna ditch linux all together because the creator has been infected by genAI ( used LLM to heko debug, which is a big sin in my codebook ), so I have been trying NetBSD. I got it installed last night, but now I need to figure out how to get xfce4 to be default desktop environment I boot into.
Someone else listed a no-ai OS website, so I am gonna look into some of the other BSDs there as well.
You may as well abandon life altogether, because life has been “infected” with reality.
yes, obviously the solution to things being shit is to just give up and die, what wonderful advice.
And reality is shapes by our actions. We work hard enough and we may and genAI forever best case scenario. Worst I’ll take is societal values equating genAI with CP levels of degeneracy and depravity.
You’re deluding yourself, friend, and will only cause you more pain in the long run. Eradicating AI is as likely as eradicating computers themselves. I mean, I’m not going to delete the dozens of models off my devices, and I’m just one person. Accept that innovation is here, and find a winnable battle to focus on.
The problem is I am optimistically delusional, so I firmly believe it is a winnable battle. I refuse to give up, even if it means becoming the poster person for the movement. By any means necessary, I believe us people ( the non genAI users not included because they ain’t people ) must win the war.
Also, you’re talking to a stubborn autistic 'tard, so it’ll be nearly impossible to change my stance on this due to my autistic passion level of hatred.
Oh, yeah, I get you. I’m the same way about the color purple. l won’t rest until the entire hue is eliminated from the electromagnetic spectrum, and anyone who uses it for anything, for any reason, is shunned as a degenerate.
You’re talking to a fellow obstinate. We can accomplish literally anything, no matter how outlandish or inane. I hate purple so much!!!
I can recommend “outside”.
Been working pretty well this year so far.
Given Debian’s slow development and focus on stability above all else I doubt this will make any practical difference to contributions that actually end up in releases. And honestly at this point every OS or piece of software needs to have AI reviewing its codebase for vulnerabilities, even if it’s not making any code contributions.
I think if only submissions that follow a certain guideline are accepted then I doubt this will result in lower quality, it will even likely increase its quality by fixing relevant bugs. So I don’t think quality will degrade so long as parts of it don’t turn into 100% automated code factories.
The only thing that remains are the ethical challanges but hardly anything in this world is completely free of entanglement to ethically questionable practices. You use a lenovo to write code? They are probably funding millions into AI. You have a nvidia gpu in your computer? Yeah, ofcourse it is good to take a principled stand against corpo-fascism. But holier-than-thou approaches will only bite back.
But I don’t understand why people did not vote for accepting AI code but with disclosure. Seems like there is nothing to lose there even if you are an AI supporter. And could be useful for statistical purposes like analysing how human vs robot PR differ in things like rejection rate/severity of bugs found etc
What about commits by Russians? Or Israelis? Or MAGAts? Or Libertarians? Or Climate change deniers?
What you are doing is not okay. You’re deliberately engaging in divisive action for no logical or beneficial reason.
They don’t care. They’re hypocrites, filled with irrational hatred. Card carrying members of the “AI Hate Boner” club and that’s all they care about. Their hatred for this narrow facet of technology gives their lives meaning.
Oh my god, you cannot be serious.
Get off the cross; we need the wood.
You may not have noticed, but this is literally a thread about people who want to change operating systems because of the tools the creators use to develop it.
That’s like wanting to move out of your house because you found out that the builders used Ryobi or DeWalt power tools, instead of defunct manual tools by ‘Spear & Jackson’ or ‘Klein Tools,’ because in your mental illness, you object to the power tools that are taking jobs from human hands, completely ignoring the fact that there is still a human in the process, operating the tool. Or you argue that the power tools ‘stole’ all the knowledge of how to be used by the manual tools the came before them. Or whatever hilarious excuse you’ve made up to justify boycotting innovation.
It’s lunacy.
Nah, that’s a bad analogy.
It’s more like wanting to move out of your house because you found out that the builders were in fact subcontracting out their work to unaccredited randos off the street who made a bunch of building code violations and don’t truly understand how to build structurally sound buildings. It’s not about power tools. It’s about the competence of the builder themselves.
And you’re also handwaving away the very real ethics and licensing issues that stem from using models that were trained by scraping all of GitHub without any consideration for project licenses whatsoever, in addition to potential legal issues down the road, stemming from said usage.
It’s not lunacy. It’s a real thing.
Your analogy doesn’t track because there’s no one new being introduced into the process, just the same people using newer tools.
There’s zero ethics and licensing issues, in my humble opinion, any more than there are ethics/licensing issues when a builder watches documentaries on public broadcasting to learn how to build. The knowledge is ingested and incorporated, not copied and redistributed. However, I’ve argued with enough anti-AI zealots to know I’ll never convince you otherwise, so I won’t even try.
It is very real lunacy. Time will tell, I’m just trying to save people the heartache ahead of time. It’s likely a lost cause, but at least I tried.
@Epp @gravitas_deficiency Oh, you’re being an absolute prick to everyone in order to help them? How selfless of you, surely no one appreciates the sacrifices you make to help others.
Thanks, Scott, I’m glad you recognize my contribution. Your opinion, specifically, means a lot to me.
Edit: you’ve had your account for four years, you’ve made a grand total of three comments, and one of them was to chastise me? A third of your Lemmy existence has been devoted to me… I’m touched.
I don’t think you know what a distro is. You’re going to need a distro that doesn’t include any packages that accept AI contributions, which is impossible to detect and enforce.
I believe Fedora requires disclosure on the use of LLMs in contributions, and that fully generated submissions are not allowed, so slightly better than Debian in this respect (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/council/policy/ai-contribution-policy/)
Linux Mint is always a nice option, but I can’t find an LLM policy for them, but given that they are removing snaps and other Ubuntu bits that nobody likes by default, I would imagine they are more resistant on LLM contributions. They don’t have a policy set in place for this though.
Arch Linux (and derivatives, I currently use EndeavourOS but many like CachyOS too!) are awesome too if you are alright with rolling release. Again, no LLM policy I can find (I didn’t look very hard though, I have better things to do), but I imagine they would be more resistant to it.
Mint is still downstream of Debian though, which will make them taking a stance against it pretty tough.
Arch, Void, Gentoo, Chimera and Aeryn all have anti-AI policies.
Do you know where I can find the Arch policy?
I must have misremembered it because I also can’t find an official AI policy.
But the devs have banned LLMs in their issue tracker, at the very least:- https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/onnxruntime/-/work_items/18#note_460864
- https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/mkinitcpio-systemd-tool/-/work_items/3#note_503832
- https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/python-huggingface-hub/-/work_items/43#note_504464
