I'm just going to stop making technology recommendations. It seems like everytime I make a recommendation, I've got to walk it back because the developer decided to integrate some kind of fuckass AI slop. Fellow Neocities user, just-a-husk tipped me off to a recent vote that Debian's dev team took on the acceptability of LLM-generated code contributions in the Debian codebase. The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Debian's official stance is "vibe coding is OK". Ubuntu is doing this as well, while simultaneously baking AI training and chatbots into its operating system. I couldn't find any serious discussions about AI use in Linux Mint, though the individual desktop environments all have their own stances. Cinnamon and MATE are "not anti-AI" (big red flag there), Xfce is explicitly in favour of vibe coding. I didn't bother looking up GNOME.
Essentially, the stance of the entire home and professional computing market is the same at this stage.
"Anyone against AI is, essentially, a Luddite." (Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft)
"The future of technology is in lock-step with AI." (Tim Cook, CEO of Apple)
"Linux is not anti-AI. Fork the kernel or walk away from Linux." (Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux)
"There is no difference. Generative AI and large language models are the future of technology." (Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google)
"It needs to be expanded, honestly. Every part of life needs some kind of AI integration." (Larry Page, founder of Google)
So, basically, at this stage, I'm not recommending Debian anymore. Give it a year, Debian will be a pile of vibe-coded rubbish that nobody can interpret by sight. Honestly, this is the entire tech sector. Billionaires use AI instead of paying people to do work; something about the technology breaks down to the point it becomes non-functional; a human (usually an intern) has to look in the code to see what went wrong; they find a pile of spaghetti all disjointedly branching out into 25,000 macramé projects; the service goes offline for 12 hours as the 1 intern spends that entire period of time rewriting the code so it doesn't break the functionality anymore; intern gets reassigned; billionaire uses AI instead of paying people to do work; lather, rinse, repeat.
That's not strictly relevant at the moment. What IS relevant is that I can't recommend any current-gen computer operating system anymore. We all know how much of a pile of shit Windows 11 is. The current version of MacOS is fully integrated with ChatGPT. ChromeOS is an advertising and trackware platform disguised as an operating system. And now, Linux is setting itself up to become a quivering mass of vibe-coded slop within a year or two. As was pointed out to me, sure, there's distros that don't use AI to code for them, or have banned it outright-- but I am not kidding when I say that consumer grade Linux is limited to Mint, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Outside of this, you need to be willing to put up with instability, experimental features, security vulnerabilities, and/or building everything by hand in the terminal. Also, considering the tenacity with which that LLM user is DDoSing The Cutting Room Floor after Xkeeper's anti-AI blogpost last month, I would imagine it's impossible to completely separate your project from AI anymore. Furthermore, it's a pretty simple matter to launch a DDoS using several discrete AI agents. Which distro's gonna be the first one to cry "uncle", huh? "Oh, we can't take this constant siege anymore, we surrender!"
But yeah. Not to say "I told you so," but I predicted this. I didn't predict LLMs, but I did predict that the corporate feudal state would find a way to consume Linux, and now it has.