No. It’s not practical.

No matter how you feel about ai or how you think it is wrong, the increased tempo of bug fixes and security patches necessitates either manpower beyond what is feasible for volunteer projects or the use of ai tools.

It’s an arms race and you can’t opt out without just missing the patch schedule.

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).

Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?

It's not possible to have a 100% no-LLM-coding-involved Linux distro anymore now that the kernel itself is welcoming LLM-assisted contributions, but it's still possible to say that everything which the distro produces itself will not use AI.

How can AI commits be responsible?

What Debian means is: by reading what it produces and not just blindly accepting it but having humans review it carefully. The quality of LLM-assisted software is highly variable. Experienced people like Debian and Linux kernel developers are much less likely to publish very bad slop than inexperienced developers who are newly able to make a thing work well enough to ship it.

I am concerned about the extent of Debian's embrace of LLMs but I still have a lot more confidence in them than most other distros (especially small hardcore-anti-AI distro projects lacking sufficient developer capacity to even keep up with security updates).

I expect we'll be seeing lots more things like this non-upstreamable-because-AI hardware enablement and distros like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) will either either adopt more nuanced LLM policies or be forked.

I am doubtful about if there will be any serious distros with hard LLM bans in a few years from now. But also, perhaps the bubble will have burst by then, so hosted inference won't be so cheap and the use of LLMs will probably be quite different.

the primary reason is AI is a thief

This is not the primary reason for most people, I don't think. I think the fact that it increases complexity while reducing human understanding is the biggest problem; it's possible (easy even) now to produce mountains of good-enough-by-many-metrics source code which the person doing the prompting has very little comprehension of. The fact that it is also a plagiarism machine is far less of a problem than this. (There are a litany of other problems too of course, several others of which I would also rate as worse than the plagiarism aspect.)

OpenBSD.

Come learn about computo.

Be free with us.

thief

If you advocate for further expansion of "copyright" oppression, you deserve microsoft windows.

There will never be an AI free Linux distro again since it's allowed in the kernel. I would certainly prefer to use a distro that doesn't allow vibe coded programs though. That junk is unmaintainable and will be abandoned when the creator can no longer afford the tokens.

Also, when the Linux kernel itself allows AI commits, is there any practicality in a Linux distribution strictly limiting or restricting AI commits?

Upstream is unrestricted, unless you want to detach from upstream it's hopeless.

I've been using Debian for a long time and honestly, I'm not going to worry about this too much as of today. We got that decision, yes. But I don't think I've seen any consequences, yet. And I always try to judge people by what they actually do. Less so by what they say.

I say that the last word hasn't been said yet. On this whole AI thing. We still got many Linux people who don't really appreciate AI. The entire community isn't really fond of it. We got people who say there isn't a way to make use of it responsibly. I have a hunch there's more to this story. But only time will tell. Until then I'm going to continue using Debian, just like I have for the past 10-15 years. I trust the community distributions, they faced other challenges before. And usually they're not half bad at facing challenges and ultimately doing the right thing.

Doesn't have to be easy. Sometimes we're headed the wrong direction for a while. But what matters IMO is the result. And I'm positive they'll find some way to deal with this. I don't think AI fits Debian's identity at all. Would be a big surprise to me if they don't realize it as well.

Void isn’t too difficult and is documented well.

I strongly dislike AI but am not a purist. Linux is already a no-go for purists and good luck with the alternatives.

I think the kernel’s policy on AI use is reasonable. As long as a distro or a package isn’t obvious slop and they have a clear policy, I’m okay using it or continuing to use it.

In the meantime, while I mostly use mainstream distros like Fedora and Arch, I’m quite happy that distros like Void exist so that if mainstream Linux ever takes a direction I disagree with, I have alternatives.

In the end, keep perspective. A distribution like Debian allowing for responsible AI use is not the same as the vibe-coded slop that is Omarchy.

What is this responsible? How can AI commits be responsible? There are thousands of reasons to not use AI, and the primary reason is AI is a thief.

I feel like you aren't actually asking a legitimate question and are just trying to soapbox, but this is covered by Debian here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/08/msg00005.html

As far as what the consequences of failing to follow that policy is, it would be covered under the Debian code of conduct: https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct_interpretation.html

NOTE: I am not a Debian user. I just performed a basic search to find the answer to that question.

the only good to come of it is the destruction of the concept of intellectual property, the tools of capital won't serve us

Some links to anti-ai digital things:

https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index

https://www.newinlinux.com/ai-free-linux-distros-open-source-operating-systems/

https://noailist.org/

f-droid repository: https://izzyondroid.org/docs/general/AppInclusionPolicy/#ai-policy

"How did you react to Debian’s decision?"

I deleted it, debian was thankfully not my main, just a backup/something of interest.

The 'vote' itself seemed dodgy, every option was going to ai in some form, or another.

https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#texte

The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance. The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian. Blindly accepting or uploading AI-generated material without appropriate human review is inconsistent with Debian's established development practices. We enourage [sic] our contributors to disclose whether a contribution was made with AI assitance[sic], but do not require them to do so.

Sure but why?

the primary reason is AI is a thief.

That's the least important reason to not use AI. All property is theft, especially copyright!

There is a difference between people using AI to help write/maintain code that they understand, and slopcoding unmaintainable vibe projects.

AI is a tool. You already trust the developers to build an operating system with the tools available.

From the Debian announcement

The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance. The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian. Blindly accepting or uploading AI-generated material without appropriate human review is inconsistent with Debian's established development practices.

It's quite clear they don't allow vibe coding. As you say, the kernal itself allows AI contributions in a similar way.

If you're worried about the ethical aspects of AI then you'll probably have to move to NetBSD. If you're only worried about quality this is a non issue.

Most of it comes down to personally mitigating the damages:

• start with ElementaryOS and Pantheon/Gnome, then decide which path you want to follow
• if you're hardcore, go for NetBSD or MirBSD or 9front/Plan9 instead of Linux
• on the Linux side: ElementaryOS, Gentoo, Chimera Linux, AerynOS, and Nura/PostmarketOS all have strong LLM policies
  • along those lines: Gnome and Cosmic haven't gone soft on AI the way KDE has
• Starlight Network No-AI List is one jumping off point, but there are several other lists including repo-slopscore and Weird Little Guys