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

  • Sims@lemmy.ml
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    51 minutes ago

    I think it’ll get harder and harder to find ‘pure’ distros. For a while you can maybe rely on something similar to Gnu linux-libre kernel that removes proprietary blobs, or BSD, or Gnu Herd kernels etc, but linux-libre is already a pain if you need certain hw drivers, and eventually an anti-ai kernel will become crippled even worse, and it will become too hard to keep track of what kernels/parts of kernels is AI assisted code or not.

    In the future, more and more new features will be from ai assisted code, and pretty soon, the anti-ai kernel will lose out to ai-assisted kernels in features, speed and soon stability (bug-finding etc).

    The same goes for the rest of the distros that tries to avoid ai-assisted tools and code, and you/others will imho get completely swamped by this transformation. In fact, you will most certainly need an agent to keep constant track of this development.

    I’m okay with AI, but I kind of feel for those trying to avoid it. Its hard enough just to avoid proprietary crap, and to me, avoiding ai-assists, is an even bigger mountain to climb. I do wish you all best of luck on that journey.

    Ps. There ARE fully open models trained on fully libre with open libre data-sets, and for you - ethical data oriented - you could/should? probably accept that ‘non-pure’ situation, and use such an open llm to either maintain an ethical distro, or keep unethical ai-assist as low as you can get away with, for as long as you can.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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      14 minutes ago

      Some day I’m gonna need someone to tell me the name of such an LLM. I’m not aware of any full-libre model which is able to code on an acceptable level. I don’t think they exist in this world.