Ubuntu Linux Will Begin Landing AI Features Throughout The Next Year

6 months ago by misk to c/linux

SuperPengato 130 points 6 months ago

What was that joke about Firefox again? "We're the browser beloved for being the only one not hitting our dick with a hammer. Now, you're probably wondering why we brought this hammer and and took out our dick. Well you see..."

More seriously, I think until the bubble pops, writing "AI" anywhere is a way for companies to attract fundings, and that money is too easy for many to pass.

That's why I tend to trust community managed distros over corpo ones. I don't see Arch or Debian pulling this bullshit.

Tho, I'd still be suspicious of the other big private company, Redhat; which is very involved in maintaining Systemd.

Honestly, if it comes to this I'll distro-hop as far as I need to escape AI.

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caseyweederman 36 points 6 months ago path: 0 23432234 23432902, hotness: undefined, score: 36, children: 3
OrganicMustard 32 points 6 months ago

Also they have been collaborating with the US and Israel to kill people on wars for some time

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woelkchen 7 points 5 months ago

Red Hat has been all over AI for a while

Hosting LLMs is different from pushing AI crap down end users' throats Copilot style.

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spartanatreyu 1 point 5 months ago

Hosting LLMs is different from pushing AI crap down end users’ throats Copilot style.

That feels a lot like "War profiteers aren't guilty of shooting the gun".

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kibiz0r 4 points 5 months ago

NixOS is whatever distro you want it to be. (As long as you learn Nix…)

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BrilliantBadger 3 points 5 months ago

Love my Fedora Atomic Cosmic, but absolutely we all be watching to see where they go, and if needed will play the distro-hop game in attempt to stay in the AI free zone

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possiblylinux127 1 point 5 months ago

Private companies are fine as long as they are run be sensible people.

The issue with Canonical is that they have been shit for a long time. They are being proped up by Microsoft and a legacy that ended 15 years ago.

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SuperPengato 1 point 5 months ago

I think there'll always be an issue depending on how dependent a project is on a company. Because the main risk isn't that some bumbleling idiot of a CEO will run the projects and his company to the ground, but that sensible people will take decisions that serve their own interests, but not the interests of users.

Free software creates a framework wherein companies may have an interest in the success of a project and contribute to it. This is a good thing, insofar that to companies, the project is just a tool that needs to work well and to the programmers, the company is just one of several contributors.

In a community driven project, those who take decisions are the programmers who directly contribute to it and who are also usually users. Their interests are closer to those of all other end users. They want the project to work, and that may also be what financial contributors want.

However, if the software is a product of the company, they'll intend to extract value from it directly. The interest of shareholders will supercede those of programmers and end users. That is why they may take decisions that are bad from a user's perspective, not because their dumb, but because they have other interests in mind.
Inserting adds is a good way to get fundings from add companies at the detriment of users.
Adding suscription tiers is a good way to extract wealth from part of the users. Adding AI is a good way to secure loans from banks that speculate on the AI bubble, and maybe even from companies like Nvidia, interested in making the bubble last and grow.

It's not a matter of being sensible or not, it's a matter of whose interest you're sensibly serving.

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possiblylinux127 1 point 5 months ago

Not all companies are chasing short term profit

In a healthy environment companies work to maintain a healthy customer base. Competition is what drives innovation and keeps companies well behaved.

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slazer2au 53 points 6 months ago

Not like we need more reasons to not use Ubuntu.

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username_1 26 points 6 months ago
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Eyekaytee 21 points 6 months ago

When Ubuntu was just appearing I was using Debian. People laughed at me, saying I am a little bit slowpoke

Why are you offended being called a slowpoke using slowpoke OS?

I use it on my server because of this reason

Now it looks like Ubuntu is starting to die

Its been dead according to linux purists since 2011 when they went to Unity over Gnome or KDE so ignore them :P

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thingsiplay 11 points 6 months ago

Ubuntu was easier to use out of the box, especially for some hardware like Nvidia hardware in example. Also the software from its repository and the Kernel is not updated nearly as often as Ubuntu. All of this makes it harder to use for Gaming oriented people. Back then Debian users laughed at me (Ubuntu user back then) for using a "toy" distribution. But Debian was not a good option for me back then.

My point is, it does not matter if someone laughs at you. Just use the best option for you.

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woelkchen 2 points 5 months ago

Just use the best option for you.

Problem is when people don't use what option is best for them and make everything worse for the people who are then asked to help them (or even worse are completely unrelated and have to bear the burden anyway). There are fundamental problems how Canonical distributes security fixes (many locked behind Ubuntu Pro which is free for personal use but still requires signing up for it) and these problems are inherited by Ubuntu remixes like Mint and popOS.

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Truscape 0 points 6 months ago

You're probably not the gaming type, I presume.

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dgdft 8 points 6 months ago

I’ve been gaming on Debian stable for 6-7 years now; works great.

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popcar2 2 points 5 months ago

If you're playing modern games that just released, they often need the newest graphics drivers to run well and look right. It also helps to have the most modern version of apps like Heroic Games Launcher and stuff, but Flatpak has solved that somewhat.

If anyone here games a lot, I'd recommend a more rolling release distro (or the version of Debian that updates packages quickly, forgot its name).

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username_1 6 points 6 months ago
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radar 4 points 6 months ago

I game on Debian unstable daily. I don't have the newest hardware but most things work about as well as Windows

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Skullgrid 2 points 6 months ago

debian gamer here. Things suck because I have a non-muxing, bullshit on board graphics card not because of Debian. I have the same issues on Bazzite, Pika Os and Nobara

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Muffi 43 points 5 months ago

The enshittification of Ubuntu and Firefox these last years have been tragic to watch, even though i no longer use any of them.

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woelkchen 22 points 5 months ago

At least Firefox recently got a 1-click "AI off" button. I'd prefer if Mozilla concentrated on the rendering engine first and foremost but that 1-click solution isn't so bad. So at least there's that.

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atomicbocks 14 points 5 months ago

I’ll stop looking for alternatives when it becomes a one click AI on button instead.

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woelkchen 7 points 5 months ago

I’ll stop looking for alternatives when it becomes a one click AI on button instead.

Problem is that well maintained alternatives without that shit don't exist. Sure, there are Chromium and Firefox forks that strip all that shit but are you really willing to trust you data security with a fork created by two dudes in their free time to deliver updates the same day as their upstream projects? I'm not. So I rather use Firefox, turn that shit off manually and continue to hope that Servo will be good enough in two years (doubtful).

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atomicbocks 5 points 5 months ago

Yup, that’s why I’m still looking.

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BrilliantBadger 21 points 5 months ago

Librewolf has done a great job and has a strong stance on disabling/removing AI pieces

But yeah, it's just sad to always be fighting against the tide

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Aetherial 5 points 5 months ago

Kudos to its little brother, Ironfox.

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Keshara 28 points 6 months ago

This is going to be all about how they implement it imo. There was a specific line in that article "for those who want it", if they go for an opt-in approach which only then installs the AI capabilities, then yeah okay I don't mind as an end-user.

If however Canonical implement AI into Ubuntu without being opt-in, then I'm out and never turning back.

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possiblylinux127 1 point 5 months ago

Based on what they did with snap I wouldn't hold your breath

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MehBlah 24 points 5 months ago

Okay Okay, I'll find a new go to distro.

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quick_snail 17 points 5 months ago

Does anyone use Ubuntu anynore?

They've been the evil distro since, what, a decade?

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misk 5 points 5 months ago

They put out LTS releases which are nice for a home server where you need relatively recent packages and a couple of years of support so that you don’t have to babysit it too much. On a server it’s much closer to Debian experience as you don’t have to deal with snap, flatpak and all that weirdness.

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GreenKnight23 3 points 5 months ago

can't pull Ubuntu away from all the plebs who think it's the best OS in the world.

meh, at least it's not Microsoft. not much better, but still slightly better.

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possiblylinux127 1 point 5 months ago

You'd be surprised

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Skullgrid 11 points 6 months ago path: 0 23433359, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 0
panda_abyss 11 points 6 months ago

All I really want related to AI in my OS is:

  • The ability to systematically create file embeddings and use them for semantic search. This tech is now 9 years old, it’s not wildly energy inefficient, it only sucks that when you change the model you need to recreate the entire index.
  • A good accessibility interface that AI tools incidentally benefit from
  • Accessibility features for humans, like how Apple lets you select text on any image. Or I can send an image to Gemma 4 and the transcriptions are actually quite good running locally (though the model is large)
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onlinepersona 10 points 6 months ago

Didn't hey start putting ads into their start menu, search results, or something? This is not really a surprise given that trajectory.

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misk 12 points 6 months ago

The only ads I notice is that apt shows how many packages can be updated through an optional paid Expanded Security Maintenance. This isn’t very obtrusive but I’m on a 4 year old LTS release currently so things might have changed.

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Eyekaytee 4 points 6 months ago

He's remembering things from Ubuntu 12.10, yeah 14 years ago :)

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onlinepersona 4 points 6 months ago

Oh wow, you're right! That's when I quit Ubuntu. I feel fucking old now...

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misk 2 points 5 months ago

I used Ubuntu back then too but I’m a Gnome person so I missed out on this innovation from Canonical.

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onlinepersona 4 points 6 months ago

I was remembering my Ubuntu Unity days which apparently ended in 2012 or so. Didn't realise it was so long ago.

Ubuntu might've had ads in the OS even before Microslop. Who knows, maybe they even gave them the idea.

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woelkchen 2 points 5 months ago

The only ads I notice is that apt shows how many packages can be updated through an optional paid Expanded Security Maintenance. This isn’t very obtrusive but I’m on a 4 year old LTS release currently so things might have changed.

Receiving updates for anything in Universe requires Ubuntu Pro which is free for home users but still requires signing up to give you access to that update repository and once you sign up, they can match your account with what you install/update, so there is server-side tracking. In theory there is the possibility of community-maintained updates there but that required adhering to Canonical's draconian version freeze rules. Something Fedora and its derivates do not have to that degree (during a release cycle any update is fine if it doesn't break compatibility).

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rbos 9 points 5 months ago path: 0 23436726, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 3
aichan 3 points 5 months ago

Wow I did not expect that much dedication put into that thread

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rbos 2 points 5 months ago

it's pretty legendary

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e461h 2 points 5 months ago

That would make some good reality tv

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xep 9 points 5 months ago

Why not use Debian?

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heliotrope 5 points 6 months ago

(laughs in void)

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ComicalMayhem 3 points 5 months ago

How will this affect Mint OS?

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doc_rootbeer 2 points 5 months ago

Maybe more people will just run the Debian Edition

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