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
For the people who really don’t want AI in their OS, check this.
So . . . maybe it’s a good thing that Gentoo with GNU Hurd exists? Does Hurd even have an AI policy?
This shit’s hilarious. It’s like boycotting companies where they’ve voted to allow people to breathe oxygen.
Everything will have AI in the future, and it’s impossible to discern when it was used. Attempting to ban it is hilarious because it can’t be enforced since it’s undetectable, so the ban is completely ineffective. It’s just pandering to luddites.
At least it’s amusing to watch.
You realize that you’re in a tech sub right?
No, my Lemmy client combines the comments from all the subs for a post into a single view. You may be replying to this comment from a tech sub, but that’s not the view I have.
Some things should never have AI because it makes them worse. Your toaster, fridge, toothbrush bedside light, sofa, monitor, bicycle, mouse, keyboard, etc. Adding AI to these makes them strictly worse. Of course the same is true in software. If you have software that does what you want now, poisoning it with AI is purely destructive.
And then there are mixed cases. You could throw in AI and possibly solve some problems or add new features, but maybe your cure is worse than the original issue, and maybe most people don’t like the new features… So then in the commercial world, the bosses will force you to add AI to drive sales, because version bumps sell product, even if the general public thinks it’s shit.
But hey, you do you. Say it is inevitable. Say it will be everywhere when we didn’t need it to get what we already have, which is quite amazing already. I think reality shows our skills and proves you wrong.
Did you really compare using AI to breathing fucking oxygen? We will see if AI will be everywhere once the money runs dry and subscriptions increase hundredfold to compensate for the costs.
I agree, but is it ever going to conpletely dissapear? I understand and loathe how big corps are pushing their bubbles to maximize profits and run with the money, I am for forbidding massive datacenters and everything that will just make all of us and the planet worse, but once all that passes and the dust settles, llm and such are tools, are they going to dissapear? I myself see them as a tool, as a hammer, not to be used for cooking, laundry and such, but a tool nonetheless, is banning the whole thing realistic? Perhaps I am missing much info here though.
I did. It’s going to be ubiquitous. I know the majority of Lemmy wishes it wasn’t, but wishing doesn’t change anything.
Every single of the involved companies could go bankrupt and it wouldn’t change a thing. I mean, I have several different models on my phone, depending on my planned usage, and things are just starting to gain momentum.
Nothing wrong with being a Luddite, the movement was originally for workers rights and not removing thousands of years of handed down artisan craft that was being industrialized. We both know technologies like this are being used to concentrate wealth. I’m personally not against AI as long as its used in moderation, but insulting those who want to boycott because they see the harms of wide scale usage is simply ignorant, much like your comparison to the Luddite movement.
I’m against AI when it replaces human art, or substantially degrades quality
I don’t see code at art, and AI code sufficiently reviewed by a human isn’t bad quality. Saying that as a dev myself
AI code with sufficient review is good enough for Torvalds, good enough for me
That being said, I hate AI websites. They all look so generic. Claude especially really has a style it uses every damn time. Web design is at least partially art, and AI sucks at it
I don’t see code at art
A lot of people see programming as “type the right instructions in order to do a job”.
But that’s not what “programming” is. It’s a process: take an idea, break it down to parts, translate those processes into code, then put it all together in a way that works. You can write countless variations of code that all accomplish they same task,but someone that’s good at programming will do it in a way where the parts fit together elegantly and efficiently.
I’ve looked at beautifully written projects and messes of sloppy illegible code the technically “work”. There’s a difference: one is the work of artists and the other isn’t.
Painters do the same thing when they take an idea and turn it into smears of paint on canvas. The only difference is the medium and tools.
Okay, then, Neo-Luddite/technophobe. Specifically, the people who are opposed to the technology for sake of being opposed.
I personally believe that governments should implement an AI tax, so that the technology created with the combination of everyone’s contributions actually benefits everyone. However, whether that happens or not, the technology isn’t going anywhere. And it’s not detectable. So being in opposition to it is pointless.
They should oppose data centers, or specific uses of AI (such as for military purposes) but a blanket opposition to the technology itself? It’s moronic.
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 owned 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.
Arch, Void, Gentoo, Chimera and Aeryn all have anti-AI policies.
Do you know where I can find the Arch policy?
I must have misremembered it because I also can’t find an official AI policy.
But the devs have banned LLMs in their issue tracker, at the very least:- https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/onnxruntime/-/work_items/18#note_460864
- https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/mkinitcpio-systemd-tool/-/work_items/3#note_503832
- https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/python-huggingface-hub/-/work_items/43#note_504464
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.
i wouldn’t say they’re “embracing AI” or ‘sloppified’… but anyway.
i think slackware isn’t using llm stuff for development. it’s my daily/fav distro. but it’s quite different from debian.
I believe Fedora requires disclosure on the use of LLMs in contributions, and that fully generated submissions are not allowed, so slightly better than Debian in this respect (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/council/policy/ai-contribution-policy/)
Linux Mint is always a nice option, but I can’t find an LLM policy for them, but given that they are removing snaps and other Ubuntu bits that nobody likes by default, I would imagine they are more resistant on LLM contributions. They don’t have a policy set in place for this though.
Arch Linux (and derivatives, I currently use EndeavourOS but many like CachyOS too!) are awesome too if you are alright with rolling release. Again, no LLM policy I can find (I didn’t look very hard though, I have better things to do), but I imagine they would be more resistant to it.
Mint is still downstream of Debian though, which will make them taking a stance against it pretty tough.
There’s this list of distros that actively reject AI/LLM contributions.
There’s also this list with a few more not listed in the first.
Also found that AntiX rejects AI usage based on a conversation about it in their forum, but they are based on Debian, so…
Wait until they find out AI is used in the Linux kernel.
Poor servo.
Asahi Linux
Oh, that’s nice
Appreciate the list! Definitely going to be grabbing as many programs who actively reject AI as I can. Gotta support those who are keeping up the good fight! Thanks again ProdigalFrog!
Gentoo gang rise up!
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
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.
Well, living in a hut somewhere in a forest is probably the only way to actually avoid it lol.
Nothing wrong with bushcraft.
Shit if it was legal, I’d probably be down ngl.
It can be if you own the land or have permission from the owner.
Depends on the country I guess. In germany and austria, you can’t legally live in a location that doesn’t tick certain checkboxes, even if you’re living there willingly. You need stuff like sewage, water, electricity and a bunch of other (often nonsensical) things, and even if you own a piece of land in the middle of nowhere and you build a cabin and - somehow - tick all those boxes, if the land isn’t zoned for living (meaning it’s agricultural, industrial or something like that), living there is legally impossible and you’re living in 24/7 threat that your home is taken away. And most european country I’m somewhat familiar with have similar rules.
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.
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
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
Gentoo, postmarketOS, GNU Guix, Chimera Linux? Not seeing myself abandoning Debian because of that decision though.
Guix didn’t adopt any policy
Definitely will take a look at them! Appreciate the recommendations!
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.
