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.)

This might be useful for some Linux users who want (but don’t need) to run Microsoft 365 occasionally, but actually relying on this kind of hack is a terrible idea.

Once fully implemented, this will help draw in people into Linux, as many shudder at the thought of switching to the platform because their preferred office suite doesn’t work here.

I certainly hope this doesn’t “help draw in people into Linux”. It’s sad to think about people and organizations switching to Linux on the basis of someone misleading them into thinking that relying on this kind of thing is a good idea because when it breaks it will give them a bad impression and they’ll blame “Linux” instead of Microsoft (or Bottles or whoever told them it was a good idea).

When the lack of a Linux version of a specific proprietary program is the blocker preventing someone from switching to Linux, relying on a workaround which remains unsupported by the proprietary/adversarial software vendor is… a recipe for a bad time.

Even if this mostly works today, it is extremely likely that (either intentionally or inadvertently) Microsoft will break it in the future.

So, although I do see how this can be useful for some people when/while it works, in my opinion Linux and the world at large would be better off if this software didn’t exist. I hope Microsoft breaks it sooner than later!

No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release

This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.

Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?

Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)

What an absolute shitshow

I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.

that kernel release (which most distros have still not shipped yet) fixes only one of the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-43284); afaik even upstream still doesn’t have a patch for the second one (CVE-2026-43500) at this time.

(for people relying on Linux privilege separation, here are mitigation instructions.)

unfortunately, like its predecessor (Nokia’s Maemo/Meego), Jolla’s SailfishOS has never been (and has never had plans to be) fully free/libre open source software.

many components of it are freely licensed, but not nearly enough to constitute an actual mobile operating system you can use.

You’re correct on both points (🤦‍♂️ indeed).

I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.

now that i’ve linked you to the paywall bypass and pointed out that it is a credible journalist and outlet reporting that Proton confirmed that this happened, why not update your post title to match the article’s accurate headline?

OP, why did you put “news media claims” at the beginning of this post title? are you doubting the veracity of it? the journalist and outlet reporting this are both well known and reputable, and they have quotes from Proton’s head of communications confirming it.

Btw, you can read the whole article here on archive.org.

Plastic surgery would become more popular.

One of the paper’s authors had the same thought:

“Suppose this type of technology gets used in labor market screening, or maybe dating markets,” Shue muses. “Going forward, you could imagine a reaction in which people then start modifying their pictures to look a certain way. Or they could modify their actual faces through cosmetic procedures.”‌

She also bizarrely says that:

“we are very much not advocating that this technology be used by firms as part of their hiring process.”

and yet, for some reason:

The next step for Shue and her colleagues is to explore whether certain personality types are drawn to specific industries or whether those personality types are more likely to succeed within given industries.

i haven’t used it myself but https://jmp.chat/ looks good if you’re OK with a US or Canadian number.

there is a lemmy community about it here: !sopranica@lemmy.ml.

cc @singpolyma@lemmy.ml

“But you can’t copy with Ctrl+C, it’s…” - You can. When something is selected It copies selection to clipboard, otherwise it sends SIGINT.

What terminal emulator are you using where ctrl-c copies instead of sending SIGINT when text is selected? In every one I’ve ever used, ctrl-c still sends SIGINT even with text selected (and one must must use ctrl-shift-C/ctrl-shift-V to copy/paste).

I don’t have any suggestion for getting the behavior you’re asking for, but besides the normal ctrl-(shift)-C/V clipboard FYI you also have two other types of clipboard-like things: one which works anywhere (not only in the terminal) and is actually always automatically copying anything you select and lets you paste from it with middle click (this originated with X Windows but i think most Wayland compositors have also implemented it by now), and another which is found in GNU Readline (used by bash and numerous other REPLs) called the “kill buffer” which can be pasted (or “yanked”) from and cut (or “killed”) to using Emacs keyboard shortcuts (which also include various cursor movement controls).

Notes:

• the kill buffer is local to a given readline context, it’s not shared across different shell windows.
• the list of emacs keybindings in that wikipedia article i linked is currently confusingly referring to the kill buffer as “the clipboard”
• you can drastically reconfigure your readline keybindings and other behavior by editing your .inputrc file, but you cannot achieve what you were originally asking for because there is no concept of text selection in readline.

HTH!

the info line contains the answer:

Info: applications using this runtime: io.github.Hexchat

You need to remove Hexchat if you want to remove the end-of-life runtimes it requires.

I regret to inform you that the maintainer wrote in February 2024: This will be the last release I make of HexChat. The project has largely been unmaintained for years now and nobody else stepped up to do that work.

My computer uses both system and user remotes.

Because my .var directory is almost full, […]

If you’re low on disk space you probably want to have everything installed as either user or system, to avoid having some runtimes installed in both.

Here is the paper: Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills (sci-hub pdf link).

It was published in 2017 but only won the Ig Nobel prize this year.

Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡

I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.

paywall bypass: https://archive.is/mdi9x

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Distrowatch is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Distrowatch community […]