this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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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

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[–] Sims@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

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 Hurd 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 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 3 points 1 day ago

would you mind sharing an example of such libre model? i'm not into LLMs (more like "anti-ai") and searching for keywords like "open source" llms just gives result to open(?) weight stuff like qwen

[–] bring-april-plenty@kbin.earth 11 points 2 days ago

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

[–] k0k0_belgium@lemmychan.org 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 days ago

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...

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