I have been using Linux for over 8 months now, and my primary distribution of choice was Debian.
Debian recently conducted a community vote on allowing AI contributions, and it ended up allowing responsible AI contributions.
What is this responsible? How can AI commits be responsible? There are thousands of reasons to not use AI, and the primary reason is AI is a thief.
How did you react to Debian’s decision? Did you switch distros? Which one was your option, and why?
Also, when the Linux kernel itself allows AI commits, is there any practicality in a Linux distribution strictly limiting or restricting AI commits?
I have no serious usability issue with Debian now but am concerned about the use of AI even in my Linux distribution. Should I keep going with Debian or consider any other distribution, as I only have 8+ months of experience as a daily Linux user? I tried almost all Linux distros and am comfortable with everything except Void Linux and highly complex ones like Gentoo.
Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?
No, because there’s no such thing as “AI”. It’s irrational to try to remove something that doesn’t exist. People will continue using computers to compute regardless.
On the other hand I don’t think developers should accept generated slop. I guess that’s what “responsible” means.
The linux kernel is compromised. Lets use NetBSD!
I hope this whole thing makes hurd grow.
Hurd’s tAInted too :/
Unless you literally programmed every component yourself, you can’t get away from some level of LLM involvement, even if the distro itself bans it. There is no 100% certain way to check code for LLM use. So if a developer doesn’t disclose it, and the maintainers accept the code, it’s in the official codebase now.
There’s a deeper problem though, which is a problem of demarcation. What counts as an “AI contribution” to you? Obviously vibe-coding is. But what about more subtle uses?
What if a developer uses an LLM to read the code and suggest a way to make a certain contribution, but it never actually generates any code, the developer implements the LLM’s suggestion completely by hand. Does that count?
What about if a developer hand writes 95% of the code themselves, but that last 5% they aren’t as confident in, so they have the LLM generate it. Does that count?
What if an extremely experienced developer uses an LLM to generate 100% of the code, but spends hours going over ever single line making sure it is correct and making little tweaks before submitting the code?
What if a developer writes the initial code 100% by hand, and only uses an LLM to go through and optimize the formatting and performance before submitting it?
What if a developer writes 100% of the code by hand, but uses an LLM to generate a bunch of unit tests and documentation?
These are just some of the ways that LLMs can be involved in the process of software development, and most of these wouldn’t have any real chance of being caught by a maintainer doing some sort of scan to detect LLM usage.
I’m not saying these uses are or aren’t justifiable/acceptable, but my point is it’s often not clear what people consider to be “over the line”. Almost no experienced devs in the FOSS world are advocating for the 100% vibe-code/token-maxing approach. But lots of them are comfortable with using LLMs in similar ways to what I listed earlier.
The tough truth is that you’re almost certainly already using software that has LLM involvement at some level. Short of going full Amish mode, or using completely pre-LLM software in some kind of air gapped setup, you’re not going to be able to avoid it.
What if someone does a copy/paste of a code snippet from a google search and then modified it for their own purposes?
According to the grifters, this is “AI” but it’s not and nobody cares. There is no boundary for something that doesn’t exist (“AI”). That’s fundamental to the grift.
I think you can see large Linux distributions like a supermarket. In a supermarket, you can find junk food, booze, and pringles, or bio fruits and vegetables which you prepare yourself. Of course there are differences between what different markets offer, but what ultimately matters is what you chose to buy.
Distributions do have mostly influence over their internal build tools, packaging, infrastructural decisions like when to adopt Wayland or the choice of init system. They are unlikely to reject security fixes in the kernel or in a browser just because these contain AI-assisted bug fixes. They do not have real control over upstream development practices.
The above might change if security gets affected by AI slop. For example, Debian is used a lot as a server distribution and security matters a lot. So, it is unlikely to compromise on that.
One can use smaller, more minimalist distributions, or alternatively make minimalist choices in ones own package selection. Or use e.g. not vim but the ai free fork of vim.
One distribution which stands out in its philosophy is Guix. It is entirely reproducible and stresses that anyone can built it from reviewable source code. This is so important that non-free firmwares are rejected (which gets them a lot of hate and negative astroturfing). That gives a lot of transparency and a solid base for trust.
Now, accepting vibecoded, unreviewable packages would make the whole buildable-from-source aspect moot, so I guess they are unlikely to accept slop packages.
No. It’s not practical.
No matter how you feel about ai or how you think it is wrong, the increased tempo of bug fixes and security patches necessitates either manpower beyond what is feasible for volunteer projects or the use of ai tools.
It’s an arms race and you can’t opt out without just missing the patch schedule.
thanks, TrollAccount69, that’s genuinely what I thought too!
How about posting alongside a… friend?
Aye, I could do that
Yeah, all the FOSS communities have been starving for labor since they started. Likely the best we could hope for is that the true experts at the top are maintaining a critical eye on what makes it in.
Sorry to bring this into the Linux discussion but OpenBSD is still here. even if the code were AI-generated it would have to go into the meat grinder of style, logic, and cleanliness that all human code goes through to get into release.
Maybe it’s time to consider your switch?
I heard that OpenBSD is not so friendly enough to daily drive as a primary operating system. Are you using it?
Plus NetBSD has Anti AI contributor policy these two are safe haven for people that don’t want AI. Also Ironclad OS GPLv3 licensed also available for anyone wants to.
NetBSD! I am currently learning UVM and it’s really impressive to a memory newbie
Is most of the training data for popular LLM tools stolen? Yes, but the algorithms are not so from a theoretical perspective there’s nothing inherently wrong with developers using AI (which itself is a broad term covering frontier models to simple neural net classifiers) but it’s a matter of their tools which afaik is the responsibility of the developer. (Ex. Devs aren’t banned from using VS Code even though Microsoft is not a good company) (Ex. Dont upload user PII to online tools just to convert a pdf you’re responsible if they steal user data)
So really responsible AI means developers accept liability for any theft or plagarism these tools commit, just as they would if they plagarized code themselves which is less problematic for developers than introducing precedent for restricting developer tooling.
In theory you could revert the commits that are labelled AI-generated but given the scale and application of LLMs that’s a lot of code to rewrite that was already reviewed by maintainers for a lot of important processes and will have likely undergone far less scrutiny and correctness tests. Until AI companies are held responsible for training data that’s stolen and their generated outputs are held to legally be plagarism there is negative incentive to rewrite ai-generated code.
Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?
It’s not possible to have a 100% no-LLM-coding-involved Linux distro anymore now that the kernel itself is welcoming LLM-assisted contributions, but it’s still possible to say that everything which the distro produces itself will not use AI.
How can AI commits be responsible?
What Debian means is: by reading what it produces and not just blindly accepting it but having humans review it carefully. The quality of LLM-assisted software is highly variable. Experienced people like Debian and Linux kernel developers are much less likely to publish very bad slop than inexperienced developers who are newly able to make a thing work well enough to ship it.
I am concerned about the extent of Debian’s embrace of LLMs but I still have a lot more confidence in them than most other distros (especially small hardcore-anti-AI distro projects lacking sufficient developer capacity to even keep up with security updates).
I expect we’ll be seeing lots more things like this non-upstreamable-because-AI hardware enablement and distros like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) will either either adopt more nuanced LLM policies or be forked.
I am doubtful about if there will be any serious distros with hard LLM bans in a few years from now. But also, perhaps the bubble will have burst by then, so hosted inference won’t be so cheap and the use of LLMs will probably be quite different.
the primary reason is AI is a thief
This is not the primary reason for most people, I don’t think. I think the fact that it increases complexity while reducing human understanding is the biggest problem; it’s possible (easy even) now to produce mountains of good-enough-by-many-metrics source code which the person doing the prompting has very little comprehension of. The fact that it is also a plagiarism machine is far less of a problem than this. (There are a litany of other problems too of course, several others of which I would also rate as worse than the plagiarism aspect.)
Yeah the Debian Project’s position makes a lot of sense to me. They’re basically saying that they won’t be wasting a bunch of resources trying to seek out LLM generated code and purge it and will instead just focus on making sure ALL the code is up to their quality standards. This will likely mean they spend a lot of time sifting out slop anyway, and will allow them to keep just focusing on making the project do what it’s always done. Ship a stable, usable, and free distro.
There are a few distros that do reject all AI code, which you can find in these two lists:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#linux-based (under the ‘Alternative Linux-based operating systems’ section).
OpenBSD.
Come learn about computo.
Be free with us.
Can you share your experience with OpenBSD please?
Pour yourself a cup of coffee.
IN GENERAL: You will encounter much more friction in dealing with certain day to day tasks (until you configure everything) but unlike Linux you will find that the system is much easier to understand and therefore the fixes “stick” in your head a bit easier.
Overall, Linux is like going on a pleasant hike that has occasional 120° cliff faces you need to climb. OpenBSD is like hiking a mountain where you are at a consistent 45° angle. You’ll face challenges but the resolutions are understandable and internally consistent with each other, and you will find you’re own understanding of the system improves much more consistently through use.
USER EXPERIENCE: Desktop: You will be using X11 for the forseable future, particularly OpenBSD’s security oriented fork of Xorg. For the most part any knowledge of setting up an Xorg desktop will transfer with little issue and the applications one would expect to see in such a desktop are present. OpenBSD comes with a few built in window managers which all ere on the “classic” side of the house. Most notably is cwm (Calm Window Manager) which is somewhat inspired by plan9’s Rio.
Wayland is still experimental but there has been a good deal of progress here, DWL is at a point where it “mostly works” though it is far off from being the default. It is important to note that “being the default” actually means something in this space. The OpenBSD developers pride themselves on having and extremely secure and well maintained “base system” so the OS and it’s surrounding ecosystem encourages users to not deviate from defaults as much as possible. That being said Wayland will likely, eventually, become the default.
Applications: The ports tree is less comprehensive than FreeBSD and certainly less than Linux but there is a surprising amount of less commonly used software in there. Case in point, Librewolf is in the ports tree as of 8.0 current. For the most part you will find the tools you need with little issue though; Krita, Kicad, Emacs, etc. There is generally a tool to match your need, though you may need to adapt your workflow to the OS from time to time.
System Administration: This is where she really shines. OpenBSD is understandable; it presents a clean and comprehensible computing experience that invites you to fully grasp how your operating system works. Unlike Linux, which has to cater to a wide variety of use cases, OpenBSD’s tooling is simple and focused on a few specific tasks. In general OpenBSD leans heavily on being a UNIX-like and as a result understanding of Unix is directly transferrable to understanding of OpenBSD.
That being said, OpenBSD also suffers somewhat from being tied closely to its Unix roots so certain aspects of the base system can seem a bit “dated”. A few notable examples being limits on shared memory and concurrent processes being low by default and the default partitioning scheme not fully utilizing very large SSDs. Important to note here; all of these can be easily configured so it’s not that much of a headache.
Another area where OpenBSD is a bit behind, though it has not negatively impacted me, is its file system. FFS is serviceable but it is not a featureful or performant as the “cool kids” of FreeBSD and Linux (ZFS, btrfs). This is being remediated though (see below).
SECURITY: OpenBSD doesn’t have namespace or chroot based process isolation the way Linux or FreeBSD does. Instead it uses a novel approach in the form of two simple syscalls, pledge and unveil.
Pledge is used to limit the specific syscalls a process is allowed to make and when, unveil limits the portions of the file system that are accessible to the process.
Despite seeming less powerful than things like a Linux container these two primitives have proven to be remarkably capable of isolating and securing software used in OpenBSD.
That being said they do take some getting used to and can create certain headaches if you are not familiar. In general, whenever you download a package there will be a message about a new file in /use/local/doc/pkg-readme/; read it.
THE FUTURE: OpenBSD’s development is best described as communal. Users are somewhat tacitly expected to contribute in some way (bug reports, write ups, etc). Personally I like this as it creates a more tight knit and supportive community.
As a direct result of this, and the simplicity/understandability of the system there is a lot of “low hanging fruit” being attacked right now. As mentioned above Wayland is close to being stable and one of the developers for 9front (Ori Bernstein) is working on porting GEFS (the Good Enough File System) to OpenBSD which should bring OpenBSD much closer in performance to its peers in terms of file system. Vmm (the native hypervisor) just got multi-vcpu support in 8.0 and there are a slew of other minor improvements that are accruing.
THE COMMUNITY: The most concise way I can describe the OpenBSD community is “they respect your intelligence.” It is expected that you have read the man-pages and readmes for the software you are using, it’s expected you have an understanding of the guts of the system. This can seem gatekeepy or a bit conceited but allow me to present a counter argument. They don’t think you’re an idiot by default.
The community, as a result of its proximity to other areas in the “indie” computing scene, tends to carry a certain set of cultural markers. There is a lot of cross pollination from the 9front and Suckless communities and as a result you’ll interact more with that computing philosophy. In general the community appreciates simplicity, comprehensibility, and hackability.
CONCLUSION: It is fun, satisfying, comfy and, most importantly, AI free. Learning how the system works feels good partly because the barrier to learning the system and contributing to it is actually much lower than in other systems. I have come to love it, principally, because it has a certain degree of “humanity” that makes it a joy to use.
i love your mailing list, i learn so much about literally everything every single day from misc@
You may have me mistaken with someone else haha. That being said maybe I should start one lol
Some of us learned how to code in the first place, and didn’t write overly complicated spaghetti code full of vulnerabilities for the AI to find.
Even if you’re a genious coder, you’ll still have vulnerabilities in your dependencies.
There will never be an AI free Linux distro again since it’s allowed in the kernel. I would certainly prefer to use a distro that doesn’t allow vibe coded programs though. That junk is unmaintainable and will be abandoned when the creator can no longer afford the tokens.
Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release – “Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned.”
maybe that could be because people do a small project then get bored and doesn’t apply to something like kernels?
Let’s see if the Kernel is abandoned in a few months, seems likely
thief
If you advocate for further expansion of “copyright” oppression, you deserve microsoft windows.
100%.
This. So much.
I am old enough to remember many people on the Internet questioning the entire concept of copyright and reacting to it with free licensing, defense of torrent sites, founding Pirate Parties.
Now I read that the primary reason to reject AI is that it is a “thief”??? In the era I described above, someone wrote a song with the lyrics: copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left, copying it makes one thing more, that’s what copying’s for…
Copying… is fuuuuuuuuun 🎶🎵
Copyleft is a hack of copyright that ensures rights to users of software that you wouldn’t have if there was no copyright. Software is different from other creative works like music and books in that it does computing. Sharing a binary file freely isn’t enough - you need the source code to keep it maintained or change it to your will (through collaborative efforts). You prevent others withholding the source code via that copyrighted license.
You can reject the unreasonable sentences of copyright infringement, the illegality of breaking locks on your own hardware, or the long copyright terms while still promoting copyright for copyleft’s sake. Companies lobbies for those laws to prevent "stealing’, throwing people in jail or fining them into oblivion - are they going to undo all that? Can I share Disney films without going to jail now?
while still promoting copyright for copyleft’s sake.
What the hell.
Copyleft means “the absence of copyright”, not “copyright wielded by radlibs”.
Words have different usages among different groups of people. Wikipedia seems to support my use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
TIL radlibs’ holy scripture smears copyleft. The page reads like it was written by a bourgie copyright advocate.
I should have known, radlibs’ holy scripture was founded by ancaps after all.
That’s many new words for me, seems some groups of people also have no usage of words that others use!
I value software freedom; basically being in control of your own computing. I dislike others taking my code and then denying their users the same freedoms they enjoyed. If not for that I could do without most of Copyright as it is today.
You don’t get what copyright is at all. The bourgie propaganda seems to have convinced you that “copyright protects you from copyright and if it weren’t there nothing would protect you from copyright”
For some people, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of
capitalismthe copyright system.
GPL may call itself “copyleft”, but legally it is dependent on copyright to be enforceable. In the first place, the whole point of licenses like GPL is to ensure that when people take from the commons, they also give back to the commons. The way AI gains its ability to generate shitty code undermines this, and so is ideologically very much at odds with Linux and the wider FOSS world.
Copyright is a deprivation of freedom, and the GPL comes using this rules to turn around them. I won’t defend copyright. AI comes with more important problems, such as ecology, and creating monster private companies that have far too much power.
The tool in itself can really be usefull when well used. Many people use it and get nice results. Many people abuse it, and many people abuse themselves with it. It is true with a hammer too. I don’t think “hammer-free” is a feature, even if their are many domain in which I don’t see the point of using a hammer (and so “made with a hammer” isn’t a feature either).
Also, I can’t find any example in history of a technology that was successfully banned despite being usefull. Some have been regulated, such as nuclear industries, but that was not perfect and needed a continuous and hard strugle. The strict “no-AI” movement has already lost its battle, at most we could get regulations, maybe…
The thing is, if all other things remain the same, an absence of copyright will also be used by the wealthy and powerful to further enrich and empower themselves and as a tool of oppression.
From the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition:
#34 War is good for business.
#35 Peace is good for business.
You cannot have internally consistent, principled view on copyright without also having a compatible view on the economy. And even then, the economy needs to come first; you cannot start destroying load-bearing pillars, no matter how ugly, without first getting everyone out of the house.
The tool in itself can really be usefull when well used. Many people use it and get nice results.
The way I see it, there are two kinds of people: those to whom AI is utterly useless because it just ends up taking more time and have them burn through their cognitive endurance faster, and those to whom it would be irresponsible to let them use it, because it would prevent them from finding better solutions for the busywork they’re letting the AI do, and they just end up creating a lot of needless maintenance overhead.
But more importantly, being “useful” to certain individuals is not the same as being good for society. Which brings us back to it undermining licenses like the GPL, which would further enrich and empower the already advantaged.
Also, I can’t find any example in history of a technology that was successfully banned despite being usefull.
CFCs? Asbestos? The bans on them aren’t perfectly enforced, but nevertheless, the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking and the number of people dying of asbestos-related lung cancer is reducing, so they do have value.
The strict “no-AI” movement has already lost its battle
Even if it were true, that would be no reason to stop trying or to stop saying the truth: No matter useful you experience it as being, you are causing harm. To yourself, to the field, to society.
You can call it “the truth”, but I will call it “the dogma”.
It only appears dogmatic to someone under the mistaken impression that technologies are value-neutral. Make no mistake: even if every generative AI model were open-source and you could run on your own hardware, it would still be a technology that empowers the already advantaged far more than anyone else.
GPL wields the copyright system against itself, like a virus. The goal is the complete destruction of the copyright system and the liberation of all software.
It won’t exactly be able to accomplish anything like that if it’s been undermined no matter what the mechanism of its enforcement is.
This is the GPL’s trap card. When it gets undermined, the “copyright” system loses its credibility.
That was the idea, at least. Seems like there’s people who double down on their belief in copyright in response. But that’s their own fault.
The usual saying applies: “It’s easier for them to imagine the end of the world, than the end of
capitalismthe copyright system.”
GPL (and copyleft generally) gets way more attention than it should. In the wild, MIT and similar permissive licenses are by far the most common. Linux is on GPL, but that may be a historical artifact as much as anything. I don’t know if Linus himself would choose it if he were making the choice today.
The wider FOSS community, in my experience, leans permissive rather than copyleft. The copyleft people are just loud.
EDIT: To be clear, when I say I don’t know what choice Linus would make today, I don’t mean that I’m skeptical he’d choose GPL. I literally just mean that I don’t know. He’s been quite clear that he’s not a principled believer in copyleft, but it does have real advantages for a project like the Linux kernel.
I’ve been using Debian for a long time and honestly, I’m not going to worry about this too much as of today. We got that decision, yes. But I don’t think I’ve seen any consequences, yet. And I always try to judge people by what they actually do. Less so by what they say.
I say that the last word hasn’t been said yet. On this whole AI thing. We still got many Linux people who don’t really appreciate AI. The entire community isn’t really fond of it. We got people who say there isn’t a way to make use of it responsibly. I have a hunch there’s more to this story. But only time will tell. Until then I’m going to continue using Debian, just like I have for the past 10-15 years. I trust the community distributions, they faced other challenges before. And usually they’re not half bad at facing challenges and ultimately doing the right thing.
Doesn’t have to be easy. Sometimes we’re headed the wrong direction for a while. But what matters IMO is the result. And I’m positive they’ll find some way to deal with this. I don’t think AI fits Debian’s identity at all. Would be a big surprise to me if they don’t realize it as well.
Void isn’t too difficult and is documented well.
I strongly dislike AI but am not a purist. Linux is already a no-go for purists and good luck with the alternatives.
I think the kernel’s policy on AI use is reasonable. As long as a distro or a package isn’t obvious slop and they have a clear policy, I’m okay using it or continuing to use it.
In the meantime, while I mostly use mainstream distros like Fedora and Arch, I’m quite happy that distros like Void exist so that if mainstream Linux ever takes a direction I disagree with, I have alternatives.
In the end, keep perspective. A distribution like Debian allowing for responsible AI use is not the same as the vibe-coded slop that is Omarchy.
Btw, today I tried once again to install Void and successfully installed it on my computer. With 5hrs + concentrated setup, I installed graphic drivers, power management tools, swap and app armor on the system.
Don’t know how the experience will be, but this time, with a successful installation, I feel much more satisfied than building arch.
I think my hardware situation is simpler (iGPU). May be why I haven’t had many issues. There is a derivative called Odyssey Linux that makes Void easier. It is very new with a very small community at the moment but I’ve tried it and it makes many things easier.
documented well.
I’m gonna disagree on this point, I tried Void both on a VM and a spare SSD and I found the documentation was lacking. Or in the case of getting pipewire working I had to go to Reddit to find a workaround as none of the official ways to set it up worked on my systems. And it was far from the last time I had to find an undocumented solution to an issue I was facing.
I really like the idea of a completely independent distro purpose built instead of just “scraping the mold off” existing distros. But I had enough headaches with Void that I ended up on Artix, which mostly has worked out the same as Endeavour/Arch which I was using previously.
Hopefully I can try again in the future and have a better time, since I do applaud the developers for multiple reasons.
I use Artix, btw :3
Just try to install it and use it for 1 week, and then you know the pain.
Today I tried VoidLinux once again, and after hours of trying to enable audio, I failed and finally built Arch from root. 😐
I have it on an old laptop, running Void, that I use every day for ripping physical media. I play all the ripped CD audio back while I rip the next one. I’m far from a Linux power user and I have zero issues. It’s an old ThinkPad and it kinda just works. Maybe I lucked out hardware wise.
after hours of trying to enable audio, I failed
For me running pipewire as a service even with the aid of wireplumber didn’t work at all.
I had pipewire as an autostart script in KDE for it to work. ONLY that worked, not even launching it manually from the terminal worked.
