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.
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.