Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon

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. Fedora Project Lead Jef Spaleta, who took over the role from Matthew Miller a year ago, remains resolute, saying: I have zero evidence in front of me that users are being driven away from Fedora because of AI. As far as Red Hat's community distribution goes, while this may be controversial, this should not be a big shock. In October last year, The Register reported that the Fedora council approved a policy allowing AI-assisted contributions, and anyone following the IBM subsidiary's movements will already know that last June's RHEL 10 release includes access to an LLM-based online helper chatbot: we tried it out when the product was released. We also reported on the managers of Red Hat's Global Engineering department being notably keen on the use of AI just last month. Since Red Hat has other offerings for slow-moving stable server OSes - and arguably because Debian, Ubuntu, and their many derivatives have the stable-desktop-distro space nicely covered already - Fedora has a strong focus on providing a distro for developers, and Spaleta's announcement makes this clear. The goal is: to build a thriving community around AI technologies by focusing on three key areas: equipping developers with the necessary platforms, libraries, and frameworks; ensuring users experience painless deployment and usage of AI applications; and establishing a space to showcase the work being done on Fedora, connecting developers with a wider audience. He also spells out what it doesn't want to do: Non-goals: 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. In other words, tools for developers, not for end-users, with a strong emphasis on models that run locally, and which preserve the user's privacy. It's also worth pointing out that Fedora has had an AI-Assisted Contributions Policy in place for six months, and earlier this month, Fedora community architect Justin Wheeler explained in some detail Why the Fedora AI-Assisted Contributions Policy Matters for Open Source. Our impression is that the Fedora team feels that it needs to keep Fedora relevant for growing interest in LLM-bot assisted tooling, and that it can address concerns from hardcore FOSS types by ensuring that this means local models, built according to FOSS-respecting terms, deployed in privacy-respecting ways. Fedora is not alone in this, though. There are also ructions across the border in Ubuntuland. Right after the release of the Canonical's new LTS version, Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon, Canonical's veep of engineering Jon Seager laid out the future of AI in Ubuntu. We interviewed Seager last year during the 25.10 Ubuntu Summit, and back in January this year, he published his views on Developing with AI on Ubuntu. Now the plans are firming up. Like Fedora, there's a strong focus on local models and confidential, privacy-first deployments - and ensuring that the OS and the tools support GPU acceleration from the big hardware players in that space. However, unlike Red Hat, Canonical isn't pushing its developers towards these tools. In what we see as a veiled jab, Seager's announcement says: We are not setting shallow metrics on token usage, or percentages of code written with AI, but rather incentivising engineers to experiment and understand where AI tools add value. Initially, the focus is on users instead: AI features in Ubuntu features will come in two forms: first as a means of enhancing existing OS functionality with AI models in the background, and latterly in the form of AI native" features and workflows for those who want them. As Fernando Marcela's exit shows, an emphasis on what could be termed FOSS-friendly AI - open models, privacy-centric, local execution and so on - is not enough to placate those who are really strongly averse to these tools. The Reg FOSS desk counts himself firmly in this camp. Back in January, we reported on the rise, fall, and resurrection of OpenSlopware, a list of FOSS projects which contain LLM-generated code, integrate LLMs, or even show the traces of the use of LLM agents. Soon, it seems inevitable that Fedora and Ubuntu will both feature here. Resistance, though, is also rising. Stop Slopware tries to help explain why and how to avoid it, and there's also The No-AI Software Directory for projects that have explicit LLM-free policies, whether they're FOSS or not. Bootnote It amuses us to note that both the Ubuntu and Fedora forums use the same software, called Discourse. (It's a sort of web forum as designed by people who have heard of mailing lists, but don't know how to use them and find the idea of bottom-posting confusing.) Some could interpret this shared adoption as a sign of underlying similarities between the two projects. (R)