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
Maybe this is the push you need to . . . Yes, maybe it’s time for . . . FreeBSD.
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
I’ve been tempted to give it a go a few times. Mainly for fun tbh. Appreciate the recommendation!
We’ve seen this movie before, when they adopted systemd. It’ll be fine.
You should stop using Linux altogether if you want to be that much of an anti-AI snob. Linus is using LLMs on the kernel.
No. And I think that switching from debian because “Muuuh LLMs bad” is - while obviously your choice to do so - a stupid move.
You can’t escape LLMs. The pandoras box is open. They will never disappear again, even if anthropic, openAI, google and meta are sucked into a black hole tomorrow (an event that I would celebrate big time), LLMs would still exists and be here. Instead of trying to avoid anything LLM-made, you should try to escape bad and abusive LLM projects. So no OpenAI, anthropic etc, and no shitty big tech LLMs in general.
At the end of the day, I don’t think you will find a distro that is truly AI free. In general, you will most likely not find SOFTWARE that is truly AI free.
I’d want to avoid the Pandora’s box of shit as best I can.
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.
Gentoo, postmarketOS, GNU Guix, Chimera Linux? Not seeing myself abandoning Debian because of that decision though.
Definitely will take a look at them! Appreciate the recommendations!
I had another look and I think it’s basically down to Gentoo. If you’re in for the BSDs, you got NetBSD as well. And OpenBSD seems to be anti AI-contributions as well. I didn’t really find anything else with a strict No-AI policy.
I’ll take a look at them! AerynOS seems to be the primarily distro I have found with a no AI policy but sadly its atomic. Thanks for the recommendations!
I missed AerynOS. Thanks! Let’s hope you’re going to find another one. Given there’s lots and lots of people who don’t appreciate AI written code… I feel there has to be a market for a mainstream Linux distro with a no AI policy.
some form of BSD, because the entirety of the linux kernel is about to have the same attitude :
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Is-Not-Anti-AI
Torvalds wrote on the mailing list:
"[In response to a comment: It seems like [1] expresses a very anti-LLM position in general"] Yes. And no, that's not the position of the Linux kernel. I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.Already mentioned it in the post description. The posts purpose is to find linux distros that don’t use AI in their own code. Sadly can’t do much when it comes to the kernel.
Ok… So what’s the point?
The posts purpose is to find linux distros that don’t use AI in their own code.
I’d say wait and see what they actually do. People are super trigger happy with shitstorms these days. But maybe wait for them to actually do something bad?!
LLMs were created with the mass theft of others work by corporations that are now reselling that same information while making billions off it. Thats enough for me to want to step back from any project utilizing these tools.
There are plenty (and I mean plenty) of free open-source AI, including some with open datasets that are not stolen.
I really wish people wouldn’t use “AI is theft” as a blank term because the technology itself is not inherently bad. We can hate OpenAI and still run local models.
By the way, there’s like two open-source LLMs, which are large enough to be usable in some form. And one of them claims not to contain pirated training data. That’s not “plenty”.
If you believe all that then you need to stop using linux all together. Linus sees AI tools as just tools so they can be used in the development if the Linux kernel. So Linux is a project using them. You must now stop using Linux.
Mentioned this in the description of the post already.
All you said is that you know they use it. You didn’t answer why it’s ok there? Also, Linus didn’t put it up to a vote.
Never said it was okay there. Purpose of this post is to locate a linux distro that isn’t using AI with what is under its own control. Can’t control the kernel but I can look for distros that share similar ethics.
making billions off it
Lol, no its all circular investing and will soon fail to prop itself up. Then all that stolen work gets sent to open weights for everyone to use. Still not the best, but you can’t close Pandora’s box.
God damn love to see it
Just like with every financial crisis, when the bubble bursts they will get absurd amounts of money to save their unethical shite companies with money from all of us (through taxes). The rich only ever get richer.
Yeah. But my point is: They’re not utilizing those tools. At least not yet.
Looking back at my Linux experience, I have a lot of trust in the Debian community. Including to do the right thing. Even if it’s difficult. They don’t always get everything right. But they’re pretty alright. I wouldn’t just throw it all in the bin because of some hypotheticals. And democracy isn’t easy. We judge people by what they do. (At least I do.)
I understand they may not be utilizing them yet, but the vote was approval of the tools without disclosure. So this isn’t hypothetical, they are going to begin using them and therefore it makes sense for those with concerns regarding the technology to start looking for alternatives. It doesn’t require them to start adding AI chat bots to Debian or anything like that for me to make this move. The tool itself is the problem.
That remains to be seen… As I said, they earned my trust over many years. Maybe they’re able to tackle it, as they faced other challenges. I mean you’re free to throw away democracy on a whim. I think it needs to be addressed and tackled. Votings have turned out with bad results before. It’s ugly. But I’m still subscribed to the ideology. My red line is something bad actually happening not just on paper and in some hypothetical future. Until then, there’s plenty time to repent. I still have my hopes up. They’re good people and have been doing a phenomenal job until now. I don’t think I want to ignore that. But I’m not stopping you from having some alternative plan ready. 😅 That’s not a bad idea either. All I’m saying is: Don’t borrow trouble. (And “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Democracy might indeed be a good thing, despite it’s downsides.)
Distro hopping was a hobby before people had reasons to distro hop. If þey have time and some personal motivation to look around, why discourage þem? It’s not as if having a few fewer users is going to hurt Debian; on þe contrary, þe justification for embracing AI had been “we’re overworked.” Risking AI troubles is fixing þe wrong problem; instead, encourage users to be a drain on some oþer distro’s maintainers!
They just recently did something bad.
What did they do? All I saw was them talk and do democracy. All of that is allowed from my side. I don’t think they incorporated any AI stuff (yet). At least I’m not aware of anything?!
They decided to take a vote on whether or not to “Ban LLM contributions” where the proposed policy wasn’t all that well thought out, and ended up settling on a subsequent proposal which was even worse, enshrining in official policy the standard that LLM contributions are just fine actually and don’t even need to be disclosed. The governance system, in this case, failed spectacularly. The contributors they will lose as a result of this are in my view likely to be more valuable ones than those they’d have lost had the vote gone the opposite way. It’s substantially worse than having done nothing at all. It does not inspire confidence in the future of Debian, and is enough to have many of us looking around to see what alternatives might exist.
I think democracy is a good thing. Full stop.
It ain’t easy though. Not even for the Debian community. But what’s the alternative? Some corpo distro? They’re going to adopt AI as well. And benevolent dictator might be alright… Yet, I personally still prefer a democracy. Even if it’s difficult. Sometimes voting results are sub par. But we need to deal with that, not drop it once the first difficulty arises?! What kind of strategy is that? I don’t think anyone is getting anywhere if they just keep dropping everything once they’re faced with problems.
@kbal @WorkingPie @hendrik Banning LLM contributions would be, at best, a symbolic gesture about a heavily politicized topic. For a team like debian, the concern should be about the quality of the contribution not what tooling was used.
Yes. And it goes further than that: Maintainability should also be a concern to maintainers. Doing good in the world is what pretty much all Free Software community projects are trying to achieve. They have to deal with licensing issues… It’s complicated.
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
Damn it I was just asking myself the same question. I don’t expect it to be easy to find one that’s anywhere near as good as Debian but without that one problem. I think a lot of them won’t have any firm policies yet.
That is kinda crazy yeah
Debian was always the ol reliable, the alternative to Ubuntu
Tbh I am gonna trust them and not do anything
RedHat is an AI platform and I couldnt find any sort of AI policy but heard they kinda forced their developers to use LLMs?
NixOS allows AI generated code but no comments (file) with transparency and responsibility
I may be dumb but couldnt find anything in the OpenSUSE Open Source Policy so no idea there.
Arch, Gentoo, Void, Fedora…
Debain
Please stop hyping up the power of text generators. LLMs can be sort of interesting, but they are far from the big scary terminator-level boogeymen the boosters hype them as.
The more afraid we are of slop doing something other than just being slop, the more power we are giving the companies to actually control us. Don’t help them.
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.
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…
What does that have to do with slop? Naive people have been getting manipulated since at least the 1970s long before LLMs
And that’s okay from your perspective?
Debian isn’t “ambracing AI”? Where’d you get that?
Ubuntu has been making plays in that direction. Not the same thing.
Debian devs voted to allow AI contributions.
Not even the same thing. They’re not stupid. They know people are going to use it. EMBRACING it would be more like adding AI nonsense tools wherever they can, and rely on automated systems that are based on LLMs to contribute code, which is not what’s happening here.
Posted some context in the description but the short version is Debian maintainers just voted to allow AI code without disclosure. Here is the vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/08/msg00360.html
Because the people submitting the code are to be held responsible as always. If you are using Claude gemini or whoever and submit its code without checking. And you fuck something up that is on you, and you will be held responsible. Is how it should be.
People are going to use it if they want to. And realistically there isn’t a lot that you can do to stop it all. They’ll just start using it without attribution. There is no automated system that will be able to stop it. And policing it manually will do nothing but bogg down the current maintainers allowing them to accomplish even less.
If someone is submitting a lot of problematic slop code they don’t understand. They will be booted from the project like any other bad maintainer.
