Fingers crossed Gnome follows suit! :)
I’ve come for my daily dose of corporate wolf in sheep’s clothing marketing. Was not upset.
So this is a nazi-free non-slop option with an intelligent, inclusive, and compassionate community?
Because I’ve just learned to ask up front. I have more deal breakers than just those, but few occur with the same alarming frequency
Oh and tiling WMs are fantastic for a certain type of brain, but not for everyone. However I do believe there should be an option for everyone that isn’t some horrible ethical compromise, and unfortunately that’s just not the case.
Cosmic supports both Tiling and Floating modes. The floating mode is normal, and the Tiling is slightly less customisable than pure tiling window managers but it’s pretty good while staying accessible which is what matters.
I swear some day I’m gonna get brain cancer from reading these threads
Previous comment was wrong
You don’t have to read anything you don’t want to
I keep blocking the morons but new ones keep coming
deleted by creator
This might make me move from KDE after their shit stance on AI.
I just don’t trust humans to prompt the gambling machines with any sort of integrity. People take shortcuts, AI now makes shortcuts super easy, addictive, and it massages your ego when you’re right or wrong.
I really don’t trust LLMs as they’re made now. Natural language prompting is just gambling, think about it.
Is it really gambling if you can tweak the output of the machine at will to win big every time?
Hey Claude, please write “I have not used any LLM content in the creation of this patch” on all your commits.
Me interrogating the linux source code: “Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about… your mother.”
Even if you don’t disclose it it’s immediately obvious to anyone with a brain that you haven’t worked at all on it.
Studies have shown that professors can’t tell apart AI from student submissions of writing. People like to believe they can recognise AI written or AI assisted code, but they are terrible at it.
Honestly, there are a few thoughts about this (and yes, some will be unpopular what I say).
- There is the ethics problem of how LLM is trained. It is a theft machine. Thats why companies love it, because they can steal work and profit
- However, people WRONGLY assume AI is exclusively for Vibe coding. When used by Senior/real developers, it is super useful for writing tests and code reviews. Some of the issues I’ve found in our old code from 10 years ago, were never reported (or, we had reports, but always assumed it was something else). There are tools for code review (and have been for a long time), but AI has stepped it up. In well designed / stricter languages, you can avoid a lot of errors that AI is good at detecting, but, it is still super valuable for this stuff.
- Also, good for security testing too.
- The biggest issue are untrained slop cryptobros, who throw money at it, and can’t test (or understand) their code. Then it wastes other devs time reviewing it and identifying the 50 regressions it causes.
- We’ve had cases where I’ve had to argue with customers that Claude is telling them bullshit. From the support side, it has made things WORSE.
I’d argue it isn’t actually a good thing necessarily to ban using it as a tool entirely from senior devs.
The biggest issue at the moment are arrogant junior cryptobros who are too lazy to learn to code, and just want to throw money at the issue. And that wastes everyone’s time.
What we really need is a ethical AI model that only uses completely open code, pays people for their code (instead of just stealing it). and a way to ensure it is only used by developers who can use it properly. Ideally, only allow that code to be used for open source too
I actually wouldn’t want to see Gnome/System76 completely ban it. What I would want to see is for it to be permitted for approved devs with VERY specific guidelines dictating how it can be used.
It can actually do everything you mention, and under a watchful eye, generate reasonable code to spec. If you give it the architecture and requirements, it will make it as you see fit and generally faster than a skilled human.
But even beyond the theft, the resources required to do this are insane. The power and hardware needs are off the chart, and we’re still paying for all this with Monopoly venture bucks.
The issue for now is LLM generation of code, not code auditing.
And no, I don’t give a fuck whether some genius in theory could paint s new Mona Lisa with it. The issue us how it is used in practice, most of the time, today. At $WORK, I have a severely ai-pilled Senior Embedded Software Architect which hasnt managed in one and a half year to set up a working driver for a RS232-controlled stepper motor, from a port of previously working code. A thing that should take a week at most. I had to educate him that in C++ drivers, you need to use locks or mutexes to access variables that are concurrently changed and read from several threads. AI enables catastrophic levels of incompetence.
And FOSS projects need to protect themselves against that.
Yeah… LLM Generation I agree is the biggest issue by far.
On the Kernel side, code review though apparently has been a big factor apparently, because people are testing kernel modules in seriously dumb tests that would never happen in practice, and then submitting some of the dumbest patches to protect against faults that won’t happen in reality
As a retired senior programmer, I would have loved to use LLMs in the past for very specific things. I wouldn’t use it every day, but like every couple of months I had to do a massive refactor that took weeks to complete. I usually ended up writing codemod and just painfully changing tens of thousands of lines of code. Would be cool to just say “hey LLM, see how I did this one? Do the same thing everywhere else you find it. If you encounter anything that’s too different from my template just leave it for me to review”
Yeah, and that’s the stuff people don’t talk about
I have used it to do a lot of refactoring too. Vs code has been able to do basic refactoring for a while, but, it is also good for splitting up code into different files as an example (as long as you use a plan, it works well)
But, that’s because it’s also been trained how to do these tasks. And it isn’t really doing much with the code for them
For me it’s the exact extreme opposite than your first point: The LLMs as death of copyright could be an actual food thing.
The issue im struggling with is the ecological and economic harm. It feels a bit as if the steam machine would’ve been invented but you’d throw in babies in addition to coal.
For the plus sides you’re right (as in: I agree so it must be ;) )b- with one minor exception: the vibe coding part is not bad in itself. I actually used vibe coding as a very hard exercise: develop something and find ways to estimate its quality and performance but you are not allowed to look into the code! It’s a fun brain teaser because it forces a pure outcome-perspective. The code itself is irrelevant for this, it’s the mental training that’s really interesting.
Oh except people who publish vibe coded stuff as a cool new project without disclaimer. Or as PRs. Or as … Well anything where do see itself is actually important.
death of copyright could be an actual [g]ood thing
It could. It would assuredly be a boon to the development of de-build chains: decompilers and the like.
But, as long as Disney and Amazon get protections, I’m going to advocate for the protection of works by independent artists and coders, particularly CC-SA, GPL, or AGPL licensed works. This does mean resisting LLMs (and other generative AI) on copyright grounds. (Even if on the other hand I might advocate for the undoing of copyrights generally.)
And, even if that class of issue were settled, I also agree the current state of generative AI is a travesty to be resisted on ecological and labor terms. As just one example of ecological harm, MS undid years of sustainability work in service to Copilot. As one example of harming Workers, Amnesty International has identified human rights abuses in the training of several model brands.
The vibe coding thing IS bad though… The code being stolen isn’t the code generally written by big companies (because that’s in private repos)… It’s also stealing GPL / MIT code too, and not crediting it. And then the vibe coding bros take it, boast they made it, don’t give credit, don’t use it to improve AI, and they sell that code
I’d have no issue if it credited the original projects, but it doesn’t… And thats why nobody can hold them responsible.
The ecological harm is a fair point though. They’re setting up gas plants to run these things, instead of forcing renewables.
Oh the corporate bullshit I’m with you - but I’m opposed to copyright as a mechanism, that’s why I focused on it. Code can’t be “stolen” the same way a movie can’t be stolen in my book. That said:
With the crediting you’re absolutely right, I had not even thought about it and that’s not what I intended to imply. Thank you!
Although I lack the fantasy how this could look like. I’d be very happy if LLMs would be waived the “by” aspect as it’s in possible to link a generation to a dataset - but the training data has to be publicly available under the most generous licence consumed.
But that’s wishful thinking, I know.
I don’t get the hate Cosmic gets. The only mistake they made is that they released the first non-testing version of their new DE too soon.
Cosmic is the only full DE with usable tiling out of the box & tiling is superior, full stop. If I had to use a DE again I would probably use Cosmic. Even if we ignore tiling & focus on the floating experience, even today it’s better than Gnome without extensions, it’s not even close.
The Linux community has an oddly selective memory. Everyone remembers when Ubuntu had Amazon’s crap preinstalled, but now that Plasma 6.x is actually good everyone is conveniently forgetting how incredibly bad KDE 5 had been for most of its run, like so bad that it’s hard to put it into words. Cosmic is much better than Plasma 5.x & it’s getting better.
(though I do think excluding the use of Ai tools in a climate where all web browsers & operating systems are accepting LLM contributions is a wee bit strange & largely political)
they released the first non-testing version of their new DE too soon.
This was the only issue I had with Cosmic. I don’t know what the current state of the DE is these days, but surely they’ve fleshed out some bugs by now.
Also, cosmic-text is an amazing gift to the world, for what that’s worth. Doesn’t really justify using the DE, but that library is amazing.
I don’t begrudge Cosmic or anything, it’s just not what I want. I’m glad it exists.
KDE 4 was the TRULY bad release, if I recall correctly. It was a massive change from 3 and reduction in features and stability. I actually noped back over to Windows for a while as a result. I remember 5 being a welcome return to form comparatively.
EDIT: From the wikipedia Article on KDE4, oof:
KDE 4.0 was released in January 2008. Linux.com described the reaction from users as a “revolt”, writing that the backlash KDE 4.0 received was on a scale that was unprecedented for a FOSS project. Although it was a developer’s release, several distributions made the KDE 4.0 desktop environment available to their users without specifying that it was an experimental option. openSUSE released a more polished KDE 4 option while other distributions “released packages that simply [didn’t] work,” according to project leader Aaron Seigo. As a result, many users complained about the loss of features and stability. A number of KDE developers, including project leader Aaron Seigo, were targeted for abuse by outlets like Linux Hater’s Blog. Several KDE developers stepped back from the public scrutiny.[36]
The reaction to KDE4 was overblown. Some cavedwellers with access to internet and too much free time shit on it constantly, just like the anti-systemd crowd, but I used KDE4 throughout its lifetime and still use KDE (6 now).
I’ve always loved KDE, and I’m using it right now, but pretending 4 was good is just foolish. It was freaking slow and buggy. It actually made me switch to GNOME and then Cinnamon for a while.
In my experience, much of KDE 5 was rather unstable and buggy too, which caused me to stick with Cinnamon for many years. I feel like only the tail end of 5 was mostly stable, and KDE 6 became stable fairly quickly.
They just released an OLED laptop and cosmic has no sign of supporting HDR yet. They are so far behind, its kinda hard to see what they were trying to achieve. I wanted to like their stuff, but the hardware was really subpar for the price. To top that off, they don’t “support” linux, they just ship it. I think they should mainline their drivers but I don’t know a ton about kernel stuff 🤷♂️. Either way the result is they only support pop and Ubuntu which was disappointing.
i think the copyright question is still unanswered: it could turn out that any LLM-generated code is a copyright violation by definition unless trained exclusively on a clean, legitimately-obtained dataset (which few of the major models are).
Will projects that allow LLM contributions have to roll back years of progress when the other shoe finally drops? Seems like a huge risk, especially for FOSS and copyleft. I think disallowing LLM-written contributions until this is all sorted out in the courts is the pragmatic move from a legal perspective.
If it turns out that it gets ruled as copyright violations, you can bet your ass they’re going to reform copyright law instead of rolling everything back.
I don’t disagree that it is a risk, and I am trying to move toward projects that do have err on the side of avoiding that risk. I have NetBSD on my laptop, and when I get a little more comfortable with it, I intend to convert the other Linux installations I maintain.
BUT, I believe the BSDs already went through a situation where some of their source was possibly under restrictive copyright and rather than “rolling back”, they “simply” identified the possibly infringing code and re-wrote those sections to have the same function (which can’t be copyrighted) without sharing any creative expression (which is). So, even the projects that are taking the risk that an LLM (or other generative AI) generates infringing code might not have quite as much cleanup / lost effort as you describe.
Also, LLM out isn’t automatically a derivative work of the training data. I’d have to dig through some other messages to find an exact quote from their documents, but I believe they (EDIT: the U.S. copyright office) said only output that is “significantly similar” to training data is potentially infringing. That does further limit the risk.
I still think it’s too high of a risk because well-meaning contributors might incorrectly introduce infringing code, since for models that don’t disclose their training data (Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.) even dedicated contributors don’t have the information they need to discover the output is infringing. In that past, that result (introducing infringing code) was generally limited to the acts of malicious actors that are submitting code they know to be infringing to poison a project and open it to legal action.
But, I can’t ask that someone (i.e. a project maintainer) substitute my risk/reward judgement for theirs, and I have no experience maintaining a large project. All of my code contributions are to either projects others maintain, or my own hobby projects that I doubt have any users other than myself (and I don’t even use all the published/available ones anymore).
i think the copyright question is still unanswered: it could turn out that any LLM-generated code is a copyright violation by definition unless trained exclusively on a clean, legitimately-obtained dataset (which few of the major models are).
I think this argument is BS, there are several remix/sample based albums that count as derived works and AFAIK, no one is getting paid.
Not exactly the same, and the music industry has had plenty of lawsuits going both ways on that kind of thing establishing a status quo for remixes and samples in music
“Most” music is also under a compulsory licensing system, while virtually no code, prose, or visual art is.
SilvaGunner 🫡
It’s answered, unless all big tech is going down suddenly, they are allowed, copyright violations are for the poor anyway.
Few? Do you have some example, maybe two?
IBM Granite (EDIT:
and Apertus) do disclose all their training data and claim that all their training data is effectively free of copyright (highly permissively licensed). I have not been able to verify that, due to my lack of skills with the conventions and tools of LLM / Agent training and publishing.So, yeah, probably (EDIT:
twoone).The Apertus Swiss AI unfortunately doesn’t seem to live up to its claims, and they have been silent on the issue brought up there. I honestly suspect the same of IBM’s Granite, but have not investigated.
Thank you for the link! It does look like Apertus itself might be Free Software (the U.S. copyright office says training can infringe, but is usually fair use), but it can still output derivative works of copyrighted inputs that might prevent them from being distributed as-is (for example, requiring attribution) – at all, much less under a strong copyleft.
for those who said the deets, thank you!
Few could be zero lol, i have no idea.
IBM Granite (EDIT:
and Apertus) probably qualify.
I gotta admit KDE’s stance on this frustrates me a lot.
On the flip side… I am also fully aware that policies of prohibition, in the broadest sense, tend to not be terribly successful, and I wouldn’t be shocked if some contributors simply excise the “co-authored by <agent-name>” from the commit messages with a simple pre-push hook or something like that on projects that explicitly prohibit LLM/codegen usage.
I admit I haven’t followed the KDE AI debacle very closely, but as far as I understand KDE has not yet decided on an AI policy. Am I mistaken?
Edit:
From all primary sources I’ve been able to track down, nothing suggests an AI policy has been decided. This is the best explanation of the situation I’ve found so far, though it is a bit over a week old: https://planet.kde.org/nate-graham-2026-09-23-kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/. If you have a primary source that says otherwise, please link it here, I’d like to know what their AI policy ends up being.They have, and I’m not really a fan of their choice.
From all primary sources I’ve been able to track down, nothing suggests an AI policy has been decided. This is the best explanation of the situation I’ve found so far, though it is a bit over a week old: https://planet.kde.org/nate-graham-2026-09-23-kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/. If you have a primary source that says otherwise, please link it here, I’d like to know what their AI policy ends up being.
You got a source?
Your very source confirms they have not yet decided on an llm policy. It’s also pretty old, and the link I posted on my other comment, which comes from Nate Graham himself, goes a lot more in depth about the incomplete policy proposal he had and is more up to date on the situation.
I’ll keep an eye out for their policy when it comes out, but all signs point to a policy not yet being decided upon.
IMO one of the major problems with LLm code generation is that it has the capacity to overwhelm human capacity to review code and properly understand the codebase.
From that perspective, a prohibitive policy doesn’t have to be 100% effective to be useful, it just needs to slow things down enough to keep the manageable and maintainable (and fun to work on).
Some people will absolutely lie, but I suspect most contributors will respect the rules, and ultimately cut down on AI PRs overall, as those AI contributors switch to projects who are pro-AI.
There’s no need to excise anything unless you specifically let an agent create a commit. No need for pre-push hooks.
I think KDEs policy is quite rational, it’s a compromise and still clearly anti-vibe coding. IMO the problems are overstated
KDE’s policy proposal explicitly allowed for contributors to not disclose that AI was used, which according to the FSFe and Software Freedom Conservancy, is not a good idea in legal terms.
“FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these systems change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."
Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.
Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.
Not to mention the ethical and environmental concerns with corporate AI usage, the use of which KDE was not interested in attempting to curb within its own project, which personally I think was disappointing, and even their KDE Eco group stated the policy was incompatible with the goals of KDE being a green project.
As far as code quality and reliability goes for mature projects like KDE and Linux, I trust the maintainers to know what they are doing. I have no place second-guessing them. If they think LLM usage disclosures are useful I believe them, if they feel otherwise I accept that as well. To me as an end user, it makes no difference. I’m not going to stop using Linux or KDE over LLM-assisted code contributions either way.
As far as copyright-ability, I could be convinced here. I’m not a legal expert at all, but it seems pretty speculative. I did read your first link, which is interesting. The legal risks as I understand them are:
A judge somewhere might say “This long-lived project has recently merged some patches which, to some unspecified and unknowable degree, involved LLM usage and therefore the GPL license indicated for this project is no longer valid. Therefore, the project is now Public Domain and it may be used and modified without releasing the changes.” Seems unlikely to me, but who really knows?
and probably much more likely:
A patch is accepted that replicates copyrighted code exactly, putting an unwitting maintainer in jeopardy. I looked around for examples of open source project maintainers being sued for this sort of infringement out of curiosity, but I really couldn’t find any. If this happens, I bet it’s typically handled outside of court with a C&D type situation.
Are there other legal risks I’m missing? I think it’s only a matter of time before some type of consensus for what the implications of the copyright questions are for FLOSS software.
I looked around for examples of open source project maintainers being sued for this sort of infringement out of curiosity, but I really couldn’t find any.
Since most corporate software is closed proprietary software, there traditionally wasn’t a lot of opportunities for an open-source project to even have the ability copy code, except in instances of a source code leak or perhaps the odd ex-employee. Back in the day, developers would do clean-room designs to avoid being sued for infringement. A famous example is the development of the PC compatible Compaq BIOS.
In comparison, every LLM on the market now is able to inject copyrighted code into any project, completely unknowingly to the contributor or the project. It’s such a recent issue with the introduction of this technology, there likely hasn’t been too many court cases on it yet.
If a FLOSS project was sued in the future over this, personally I think being able to point to a policy that completely rejects contributions from a known source of copyright infringement would give them a better legal defense compared to a project that explicitly says not to inform them of any use of a known copyright infringing tool. This is also why WINE has hard rules to not allow anyone who has ever seen Windows source code, either leaked or from working at MS, to ever contribute to the WINE project, as then if anyone submitted some source code anyway, they can point to their policy as a legal defense.
Agree 100%, whether you allow AI coding assistants or not, will depend on the nature of the team and their QA processes.
At the end of the day, we should not prohibit people from using calculators instead of doing the math themselves. So long as the outcome quality is good, and the process is efficient.
and I wouldn’t be shocked if some contributors simply excise the “co-authored by <agent-name>” from the commit messages
A simple mention of it in your agent instructions will also do it.
Or you tell it not to commit but to suggest the commit message
Loving my move to Fedora Atomic Cosmic. Happy Silverblue user of long time, Cosmic just fits my personal zen better.
With their fast pace of fixes/new features, this AI stance is just the nice cherry on top.
Did you ever run CachyOS? I’m on it currently and I’ve been considering distro hopping to try an Atomic OS like Fedora Silverblue.
I tried Cosmic cause it looked interesting but had some issues in how game windows loaded so that kinda turned me off. Considering giving
NobaraNoctalia a go.Edit: got my N names mixed up
I’m a Linux noob that started with CachyOS earlier this year to jump to an atomic distro recently. like a month ago give or take. I chose Bazzite though. context, am gamer, my PC is mostly for gaming and entertainment.
idk if I like it though. it’s one thing to learn all the normal Linux things I can do, and sometimes need to do, but to add the atomic / immutable concept layer is a bit discouraging to me.
I’m thinking of going back to a non atomic, but wanting to try fedora based Nobara next
Did fedora make a stand against AI? If so, I might jump from Debian
They have not, they do accept AI contributions, however their policy is a bit more restrictive than Debian’s in that Fedora at least requires contributors to disclose LLM use in pull requests.
There are a few distros that do reject all AI code, which you can find in these two lists:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#linux-based (under the ‘Alternative Linux-based operating systems’ section).
My prophecy is that open source world is going to have three kinds of projects:
-
Projects that use LLM
-
Projects that bite the dust
-
Amazing artisan art projects that are absolutely beautiful but ultimately not very significant
Buddy a project to be successful doesn’t need to a lot of users and fornsure doesn’t need LLM
-
Now if only it wasn’t a buggy mess all on its own.
TIL!
(though personally I don’t consider Elementary’s Pantheon desktop a ‘major’ DE, since it’s only used by 1 other obscure distro besides Elementary according to distrowatch, and AFAIK elementary itself isn’t super popular. Still, cool to know!).
Why not Void Linux? “Stable rolling release” does not sound so bad, considering the current floodvif security vulnerabilities…
Did you mean to have that be a response to a different comment?
Fingers crossed Gnome follows suit! :)
Fingers crossed they wont.
Kernel allows AI though: https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
Thank Thor Linus is not a trend-seeking moron like the loudest 1% of open source is.
