Both Ubuntu and Fedora have made it official: support is coming soon for running local generative AI instances.
An epic and still-growing thread in the Fedora forums states one of the goals for the next version: the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Objective. It is causing some discontent, and at least one Fedora contributor, SUSE’s Fernando Mancera, has resigned.
They’re discussing a new spin specifically for AI developers, not changing existing distros to include new stuff.
CTFD
Oh good. We can all just ignore the AI version then?
No we can’t, we must be mad, because “AI”
It’s Linux, you always could ignore any software that you don’t want
Always pretty funny to see the FOSS community willingly follow the lead of corporate investment trends, but for fractions of pennies on the dollar compared to big tech.
If you’re gonna act like Microsoft you might as well do it for the money.
To be fair, those two distros are owned by big corporations so it’s not unexpected.
FWIW, LM Studio makes it incredibly easy to do this. I’ve been in tech for decades, and there are probably only a couple of suggestions I"d made to the LMS team if they wanted to target a broader, less tech savvy user base, but I think they already have their target demographic covered. I imagine the Ubuntu and Fedora crowds are already tech savvy, but vendors making it easier to ween reliance off tech giants’ LLMs isn’t a bad thing, if LLM’s are here to stay.
Now the one thing that will turn me off to initiatives like this is if these OS vendors restrct which model can be used, or make it more friction not to use their “chosen” default. Like Google just did by pushing What I"m assuming was Gemma 4 E2B to Chrome users. I figure Google wants to offload the LLM usage to local compute to take the load of their data centers, and since Chrome is already a data harvesting tool for them, there was no downside to their operations.
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Im actually fine with this but its got to be gpl all the way and it should be like runlevels. install console only, install graphhical, install llm supported.
lol they already support running local models. wtf is the distro gonna do…? pre-install llama.cpp? this is so silly to me that people are resigning over this, too.
-The system image will not be pre-configured with applications that inspect or monitor how users interact with the system or otherwise place user privacy at risk.
-Tools and applications included in the AI Desktop will not be pre-configured to connect to remote AI services.
-AI tools will not be added to Fedora’s existing system images, Editions, etc, by the AI Desktop initiative.
- It’s a new system image, your Fedora and Ubuntu installs will not be modified.
- The applications that would have privacy implications will be opt-in by default.
- It will not use remote AI unless you configure it to.
I don’t see the problem.
Of using resources to implement a “feature” that users have already expressed they don’t want? Weird, I do.
The users would be the people who choose to install the new system image. The system image which will be created by a group of people who volunteer to create it.
If you’re not using the new system image then this doesn’t affect you at all.
The only opinions that matter here are the ones of the people who are choosing to donate their time to the project. If you think that more development time should be allocated to one project over another then you are free to volunteer your time in order to make that happen.
You are not free to volunteer the time of other people, however.
Add opt in commercials as well that pay the users in AI tokens, and opt in system for selling data on your OS to Palantir that pays user in stocks of Israeli arms dealers, give the users freedom of choice, no problem still \s
/s
Oh, I like this game.
You’re right, if you take something actually happening in reality and append a scary fabricated scenario then it sound scary.
What an interesting new discovery, I hope nobody tries to apply this in reality. Completely unrelated, Have you considered a career in politics?
I apologize to the community for lacking the paranoid delusions required to see how a project staffed by volunteers who are creating a system image which users have to choose to install was actually part of a plot by the Illuminati to force people to sell their soul to the Antichrist.
As a unwitting tool of The Man, I throw myself at the mercy of the community’s judgement. Please scourge me most thoroughly so that I may repent from my evil ways of observing reality as it appears.
What’s wrong with just installing ollama?
This isn’t a “ghost in the machine”. This is “introducing rot directly into the core of the machine”.
Time to boycott all ubuntu and fedora derivatives and distributions. Fuck AI!
I just got comfortable with Bazzite, too. Cept the wrird OOM that popped up with Firefox, still attempting to fix that one…
Soooo, which distro to switch to next? Or are they all gonna go down this route eventually? Maybe I’ll try a *BSD for once.
pretty much anything that is “you build it youself” so Arch, NixOS, Gentoo, etc
but yeah I’m also tempted to finally give BSD a go.
nixos comes with systemd
SystemD does something everyone uses, though. Many may prefer other methods, but systemD still does cover the need for init, logging, and system control, which everyone with a PC does need.
LLMs are useful to only a subset of users, so including it in general distribution is waste, because many people will end up with this software that was downloaded, installed, and maintained by someone, but they never use at all. It may not be actively using their RAM, but it is still using their disk space and has dependencies that may load whether or not it is run.
In a time of grievous constraint on hardware availability, that kind of waste is literally impossible to tolerate for many, and will force users to fewer distro choices, so they do have skin in the game and grounds to make their voices heard.
LLMs are useful to only a subset of users, so including it in general distribution is waste, because many people will end up with this software that was downloaded, installed, and maintained by someone, but they never use at all.
That’s absolutely untrue in this case.
If you read the article (the headline text is a link to an article) you would see that they specifically address this:
-AI tools will not be added to Fedora’s existing system images, Editions, etc, by the AI Desktop initiative.
It won’t be included in the general distribution. They’re talking about a new system image that someone would have to choose to install.
There seems an epidemic around here of this phenomenon where, when discussing an article or other set of information, additional context, even when already brought up or requested, is regarded as not germane to the discussion.
I did read the article, as well as most of the other comments in this thread, some of which were referring to the “creep” effect of undesirable tools into other places once they get into some of the main places. That’s what I am referring to. If you don’t want to participate in that branch of the discussion, that’s an option, as is even a drive-by down vote.
Scolding me for not rigidly sticking within the scope of the topic that started the conversation, even after the topic has drifted or broadened, seems not only counterproductive, but a waste of our time.
Debian or anything based directly on it
Debian or anything based directly on it
Debian can also run AI models. Pretty dumb reason to get mad about.
Every linux distro can run AI models, there is 0 reason to support distros that ship with AI bullshit by default
It’s not by default there. It’s a dedicated spin to self host an LLM. That’s completely different from Windows does with Copilot.
