Both Fedora and Ubuntu Will Get AI Support – Soon
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Furores are fermenting in the forums:
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.
[...] 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 preservethe 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 outthe future of AI in Ubuntu.
[...] 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.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.