cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/64896415
For additional context, here’s Brian’s previous blog post about the first preview release of Xfwl4, where he describes his history with Xfce and the sponsorship.
https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/06/xfwl4s-first-preview-release
Boycott of the Linux kernel when?
This post is not about the Linux Kernel.
Linux kernel devs use AI. This post is clearly that XFCE and Brian Tarricone are bad because AI bad. It is therefore hypocritical for commenters in this thread to continue using the Linux kernel if they are going to apply this standard consistently.
Yeah, but with Linux Kernel there is no choice. So people who are against AI can be unhappy with Linux Kernel as well but they only can choose to use alternative to Xfce but not to Linux Kernel. For now they can express their annoyance about it being allowed in kernel and hope that some day policy gets changed there as well. I don’t see any moral inconsistency here.
FreeBSD?
Doesn’t seem to be full-featured alternative for desktops:
I guess it can be hard if possible at all to use apps like Blender, Krita, etc. Also, I’m getting quite used to Portage and Gentoo FreeBSD project is obsolete and unsupported now so it would be very risky to try to run it with FreeBSD kernel.
AFAIK, they are wisely not accepting AI code contributions over licensing concerns.
The issue is the lack of software support overall. It’s possible to use, but quite limiting.
Haiku OS also decided against accepting AI code for the same reasoning (though that is even more limited, and doesn’t support a wide range of hardware, I believe).
It is still offtopic.
If it starts getting LLM generated code. Right now, it’s not bad.