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
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.
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…
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!
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,
pmbootstrapis quite a good utility). If you take that route, I recommend OpenRC as not only is PMOS anti-AI, but so is OpenRC!Of COURSE there are two of them.
Maybe this is the push you need to . . . Yes, maybe it’s time for . . . FreeBSD.
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
FreeBSD has been slop for a while, the only slopfree BSD remaining is NetBSD, but that’s probably not practical to actually use.
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.
To be honest that was sort of my story too - played around 15-20 years ago with it, then Debian (and the rest) Got Good and I just haven’t gone back.
Maybe I was just talking to myself.
Hmm.
I’ve been tempted to give it a go a few times. Mainly for fun tbh. Appreciate the recommendation!
In purely utilitarian terms, are there any interesting differences in using freebsd or other bsds instead of linux?
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?
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.
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
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.
God damn love to see it
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”.
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.
Never said it was okay there. Purpose of this post is to locate a linux distro that isn’t using AI with what is under its own control. Can’t control the kernel but I can look for distros that share similar ethics.
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!
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.
@kbal @WorkingPie @hendrik Banning LLM contributions would be, at best, a symbolic gesture about a heavily politicized topic. For a team like debian, the concern should be about the quality of the contribution not what tooling was used.
Yes. And it goes further than that: Maintainability should also be a concern to maintainers. Doing good in the world is what pretty much all Free Software community projects are trying to achieve. They have to deal with licensing issues… It’s complicated.
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.
I’ll take a look at them! AerynOS seems to be the primarily distro I have found with a no AI policy but sadly its atomic. Thanks for the recommendations!
I missed AerynOS. Thanks! Let’s hope you’re going to find another one. Given there’s lots and lots of people who don’t appreciate AI written code… I feel there has to be a market for a mainstream Linux distro with a no AI policy.
Agreed! With how many linux distros we have out there some choices on AI usage would be nice!
Fantastic it is atomic. Very promising future with this independent distro in these times.
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.
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.
Gentoo, postmarketOS, GNU Guix, Chimera Linux? Not seeing myself abandoning Debian because of that decision though.
Definitely will take a look at them! Appreciate the recommendations!
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.
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
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…
More performative bullshit. Debian will get along just fine, maybe with fewer bugs if the LKML and Greg KH is to be believed.
Downvote away, as you haul out your phones to ask ChatJippity where to go for dinner tonight.
I can recommend “outside”.
Been working pretty well this year so far.
