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
I recommend:
No AI there.
This is the only answer.
What about
?
No, that harms the environment somehow, I’m sure of it.
Oh! I know. It’s “fascist technology” because Texas Instruments is ownes by rich people.
Texas Instruments make weapon system.
There you go. Stick with the abacus. It’s the only way to be moral in his world. Of course, that’s assuming you don’t have a problem with the trees that died in its creation. To be WHOLLY moral, you should use rocks on the ground, in the outline of an abacus you made in the sand with your finger. And HOPEFULLY you didn’t disturb the micro ecosystem of the sand when you drew it.
It does use plastic. 🤔
By jove, you’re right! 😱 Clearly it’s fascist technology.
Better stick with the abacus.
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.
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?!
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.
@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.
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?!
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!
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.
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.
It’s wild that Amazon alone has already pissed away more on their own than even Nvidia has earned back. I’m also surprised that Anthropic still isn’t remotely profitable given the sheer volume of money the rest of the corporate software world dumped into Claude Code and how much pressure Anthropic applied to monetize it. That alone should be enough to show that it is impossible for AI to be profitable in any traditional sense.
Their actual plan is to monopolize information and basically use (preferably their own) AI as the middleman and broker for all data and information and knowledge and advertising that any human being ever sees. In that, they might eventually be successful. At least if they don’t run out of money trying (almost certain), and we don’t kill them off or blow them up first.
The meme about Nvidia selling pickaxes to gold diggers really is accurate
That does seem to be their strategy, at least on its face. Although I’m not even sure I even really believe that is profitable, or if they’re cooking the books with such incestuous partnership agreements that it’s to the point where Nvidia might be effectively “buying” chips from themselves with their own money on their partner’s behalf. I guess time will tell if they’re actually the next Enron or not, but I don’t trust any business that’s AI related at this point.
God damn love to see it
When the bubble bursts, do you think Altman and Amodei won’t be richer than when they started?
I think there will be two new piñatas in the water wars of 2035
I know we’re talking about corps, but damn, humans as water piñatas is so mad max
Its moreso their bunkers will be filled to the brim with supplies. I dont think we have that human-water converter we saw in Dune Part 2 just yet.
Still not the best, but you can’t close Pandora’s box.
Then mandate local ai only. Fuck big ai company with an anchor.
No one is gonna do that when they are on the cusp of eternal surveillance
We talk about opensource coding project what has to do with surveillance?
I mean if want to have “ethic” ai use ban any non local ai from use.
mandate local AI only
You said this. No one with the kingdom keys is going to do this because the actual purpose is surveillance.
Yeah but has nothing to do with context.
The 2008 financial crisis was the largest upwards transfer of wealth in US history. There are people who still haven’t financially recovered what they lost to this day, but the US economy had regained more than it lost within 2 years. It’s just that 90% of it went to those who lost the least.
With AI being forced into general stocks and federal bailouts practically guaranteed, it’s going to be the exact same scenario. The AI companies will be “too big to fail” and we’ll all be footing the bill.
Theres a ceiling to this shit though, and we are reaching it. Your population won’t carry on when they can’t eat, and it doesnt matter how militarized you are the US is too big to protect everything by force. You have to keep your population chill.
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.
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.
Correct.
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”.
Which ones are those two?
Yeah, good question! I bet nobody even knows their names. I had hoped to get a reply by @popcar2@programming.dev or @sims@lemmy.ml who seem to know plenty of them?!
I was talking about the RedPajama project who recreated the dataset of Meta’s LLaMA and proceedingly trained a model on it. And Apertus by the ETH Zürich. They also factored in ethics when compiling the dataset.
I made a post asking on !localllama: https://programming.dev/post/55905594
In case anyone knows about the existence of such models, please educate me over there!One more than i knew thank.
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, though. (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.)
The tools used dont change the core principles which in Debians case is the social contract.
Slop is never going to get through any serious quality control.
If it comes, it comes. Will be a shame. But until then I will happily keep using it.
Are you sure you’re not mixing up Debian for Ubuntu?
I’m pretty sure Debian just said they weren’t going to allow AI contributions
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
Am I reading it wrong? Did ban ai via social contact not win?
Nope. It’s a little confusing to read but option 5 won. It’s showcased in the part that lists the winner.
The pro-AI option that doesn’t require disclosure won. It has already caused one Debian developer to resign, and an ex-dev to comment on it.
Debian isn’t “ambracing AI”? Where’d you get that?
Ubuntu has been making plays in that direction. Not the same thing.
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.
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.
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?
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…
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
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?
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.
Already mentioned this in the post description. Purpose of the post is to find linux distros with an anti-AI policy.
So, it’s totally cool with you if the kernel that those anti-AI distros runs is being developed with AI?
Seems like a weird line to draw to me. But whatever. Enjoy whatever distro that is, if you find it.
GNU/Hurd maybe?
Less totally cool and more reaching for stuff that is at least somewhat doable. The Linux kernel is going to do what it wants and alternatives to it that provide the same level of functionality are just not really there at least in the areas that are important to me.
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 meaning to revisit FreeBSD for a while, I just haven’t gotten around to it.
I used FreeBSD extensively from versi9n 3.3 to 5something and barely touched linux back then. Only reason why I moved to linux was the larger community.
Then suddenly Linux became a good desktop OS without much hazzle at all, so it replaced both desktop and server-side use for me.
How is FreeBSD as a desktop OS these days? I vaguely remember compiling xfree86 from /usr/ports some 25 years ago, and dicking around with monitor sync rates to get Gnome to display properly.
To be honest that was sort of my story too - played around 15-20 years ago with it, then Debian (and the rest) Got Good and I just haven’t gone back.
Maybe I was just talking to myself.
Hmm.
In purely utilitarian terms, are there any interesting differences in using freebsd or other bsds instead of linux?
Well, back in the day the guy who was really into it would bug out his eyes at you and go “Oh YES! There’s . . . “ and he’d immediately list two or three huge differences and then downshift to a bunch of reasons why that’s better™ and then you’d go home and not remember a single one very well.
These days I don’t really know. Is there a little red devil in the house?
NetBSD is more portable than Linux and supports a lot of CPU architectures. OpenBSD is secure by default. I think the BSD’S have jails, which are better containers, but I do not know much about it.
For desktop daily use, it only matters if you really want that Unix taste.
FreeBSD has been slop for a while, the only slopfree BSD remaining is NetBSD, but that’s probably not practical to actually use.
FreeBSD does not include AI features in its core operating system, but the FreeBSD community and Foundation have explored AI-assisted tools for specific tasks like vulnerability discovery and driver development.
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-ai-assisted-vulnerability-discovery-project-launch/
I’ve been tempted to give it a go a few times. Mainly for fun tbh. Appreciate the recommendation!
I believe that there is now LLM generated code in the Linux kernel, so BSD is probably going to be where this path leads you. Solaris or AIX maybe ;p
Debain
