I had another look and I think it's basically down to Gentoo. If you're in for the BSDs, you got NetBSD as well. And OpenBSD seems to be anti AI-contributions as well. I didn't really find anything else with a strict No-AI policy.
post
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...
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.
I am moving to Piefed at scallisto@retrofed.com (https://retrofed.com/u/scallisto)
Gentoo, postmarketOS, GNU Guix, Chimera Linux? Not seeing myself abandoning Debian because of that decision though.
Surprisingly only been mentioned once, but Chimera! It's weird and strange and brilliant!
If you want something slightly more normal (well, actually, it's not any more normal, just more common), then you can get PostmarketOS installed on anything if you go outside the documentation a little (it's really not hard, pmbootstrap is quite a good utility). If you take that route, I recommend OpenRC as not only is PMOS anti-AI, but so is OpenRC!
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
So . . . maybe it's a good thing that Gentoo with GNU Hurd exists? Does Hurd even have an AI policy?
Gentoo gang rise up!
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.
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 tempted to give it a go a few times. Mainly for fun tbh. Appreciate the recommendation!
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.
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/
What about openBSD? I doubt the most secure OS would want llm code.
In purely utilitarian terms, are there any interesting differences in using freebsd or other bsds instead of linux?
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.
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?
For the people who really don't want AI in their OS, check this.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Ok am i wrong? What has global ai oligarchy to do with what maintainer decide for own project?
Well for one, most people are using cloud agents. So theres a tie. Two, and most importantly, I was simply explaining why your call for local only mandates would be laughed out of the room. AI is not here to make everyone an engineer. AI is here to put the Eye of Sauron everywhere.
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. (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.)
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. It's pretty much the opposite of "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!
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.
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.
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?! What kind of strategy is that? I don't think anyone is getting anywhere if they just keep dropping everything once they're faced with problems.
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!
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
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 Hurd 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.
Some day I'm gonna need someone to tell me the name of such an LLM. I'm not aware of any full-libre model which is able to code on an acceptable level. I don't think they exist in this world.
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
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.
Given Debian's slow development and focus on stability above all else I doubt this will make any practical difference to contributions that actually end up in releases. And honestly at this point every OS or piece of software needs to have AI reviewing its codebase for vulnerabilities, even if it's not making any code contributions.
I think if only submissions that follow a certain guideline are accepted then I doubt this will result in lower quality, it will even likely increase its quality by fixing relevant bugs. So I don't think quality will degrade so long as parts of it don't turn into 100% automated code factories.
The only thing that remains are the ethical challanges but hardly anything in this world is completely free of entanglement to ethically questionable practices. You use a lenovo to write code? They are probably funding millions into AI. You have a nvidia gpu in your computer? Yeah, ofcourse it is good to take a principled stand against corpo-fascism. But holier-than-thou approaches will only bite back.
But I don't understand why people did not vote for accepting AI code but with disclosure. Seems like there is nothing to lose there even if you are an AI supporter. And could be useful for statistical purposes like analysing how human vs robot PR differ in things like rejection rate/severity of bugs found etc
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...
I'm not sure why you think Debian is embracing AI
They took a nuteral stance on it


top 98 comments