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?
Yes
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This guy social medias
It’s Linux, you always could ignore any software that you don’t want
Well, we get to slam it and heckle its users, because, well, we need SOME joy in The world…
Right. It is Linux after all. Not microslop
I think it is good to have optional support for local models that lets people use them in an offline and private and easy way. There is a lot of non technical folks using linux nowadays and many chose it for privacy and greater control over their data.
Depending on the implementation it could hook into certain os contexts and events to actually be helpful.
Either way I don’t see the cat going back in the bag with regards to LLMs. That being said I run Debian everywhere except my work machine which is ubuntu.
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Using an llm mondel that isn’t super advanced is actually quite freeing in my opinion, the generated output is always mediocre at best, but it’s usually good enough for boilerplate and can be decent if you need to unstuck yourself. It also isn’t good enough to lull you into just letting the llm do all the work for you since it makes obvious mistakes.
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I mean, it sounds like a tool they occasionally find useful and don’t use otherwise. I’m not sure how “occasionally use a tool good enough for my purposes” is a waste. Whether it’s the most efficient application of that electricity is a different question, but without knowing their particular scenarios I can’t really compare whether other tools use less electricity for the same purpose.
(Yes, of course, “just do it all in your brain” is even more efficient, but if that’s an argument against utilities, you probably shouldn’t waste electricity on Lemmy either)
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If I have a tool that consumes resources whether I use it or not
They were talking about a locally hosted LLM, weren’t they? In that case, I’d be pretty confident in saying it eats resources if and when you use it, not all the time.
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Preemptive compliance to the tech fascism of the US?
What a ridiculous and spineless way to live.
I hope it will be that way. in the end it could be the incentive to improve accessibility and UI automation tools for wayland.
-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.
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.
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.
Is that the one that really whips the llama.cpp’s ass?
Now I have to install winamp and get a bunch of sick skins for it.
it hasn’t left my PC in 20+ years 😎 (not counting OS reinstalls lol)
Open claw by default would be cool
What’s wrong with just installing ollama?
I mean if it’s completely optional and opt-in, sure go for it. Knock yourself out. I won’t be using it (my computer isn’t powerful enough to run local LLMs)
Shame
Shaame!
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.
SUSE contributes to Fedora? WTF?
Someone from SUSE used to contribute to Fedora
not anymore. IBM decided a few years ago that they don’t want grubby fossy fingers in their pie.
kind of makes me question why anyone who supports the foss part of Linux would continue to use fedora or any IBM product.
I say this as an ex fedora fanboy.
fuck IBM.
I don’t really understand the point? You can already do a lot on Linux using AI via CLI with bash.
I’m not a fan, but obviously, AI on the desktop is not about the CLI and bash, which are not the desktop.
I don’t really understand the point?
Correct: you don’t. I’m basing this only off what you wrote, but I’m reasonably confident of my answer. Glad I could answer the question as asked.
I miss the good ole days on the Internet when random strangers wouldn’t try to white knight people who casually assault the English language.
If you don’t want people to correct you then be correct in the first place or accept the ribbing as a sign that you messed up.
And to the downvoters: there is enough free range ignorance on the Internet, it isn’t an endangered species that you need to protect. literally
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.
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…
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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.
I switched from Kubuntu to CachyOS last week, after 10 years or so. CachyOS is based on Arch, and did not disappoint so far, extremely fast, makes Ubuntu look old and sluggish. It’s really impressive. The basic installation was easy. The GUI package manager isn’t as polished but works. A little bit of terminal tweaking was required to install some packages (VMM and KRDC gave me some trouble) but the documentation was ok. Absolutely can recommend.
Cachy is a nice mix of latest and stable. Still recommend Debian for work, but Cachy is great if you want something that just works
I’ve used PikaOS which is Debian based and IMHO it’s right up there with CachyOS. super fast install, fast distro, great package manager, and repos with the latest stuff. very stable too.
Debian or anything based directly on it
I just installed Debian and it asked me for my Real Name, pass.
/s
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.
its interesting when people seem to intentionally misunderstand statements.
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
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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.
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correct