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
No we can’t, we must be mad, because “AI”
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.
-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.
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.
Open claw by default would be cool
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.
