It was bound to happen sooner or later. Built-in AI is coming to mainstream desktop Linux distros. Jon Seager, engineering VP at Canonical, has just announced something of a Five-Year Plan for AI in Ubuntu — which is really a first Six-Month Plan. They intend to include AI all over the place, but in a measured and non-trivial way.
Again, this all seems like destiny at work. Microsoft’s already turning virtually every piece of software it has — including Windows — over to Copilot, and even Red Hat has already built agentic capabilities into RHEL. On the desktop, Fedora’s talking about integrating AI — based on IBM’s open‑source Granite models — to serve a variety of purposes, mostly related to developers.
These past 2 weeks, a jump in exploits and attacks on web servers and applications tells me that in general we either distance ourselves from AI and get overrun by it, or take a thoughtful slope into it. This helps ensure we are not defenseless.
Using AI, the speed at which attackers can effectively scan, find weaknesses, and launch exploits has gone up massively.
I mention this not to be off topic, just some context as to why I also think this is such an important topic and larger discussion for the Linux community at large to have:
How Ubuntu Linux Will Add AI Without Taking Over Your PC
Which is the topic we are all touching on increasingly. I think what Ubuntu is also doing, is getting the conversation going, more broadly. Let’s face it, most likely they will not be the ones who get the balance right. Maybe, maybe not. But they have the wide reach that at least gets the conversations going I think.
If you haven’t visited there recently, I would appreciate comments being made here, on this site, as to whether opinions/expectations outlined in my post resonate with other here or not.
Thank you in advance for any such comments/feedback.
I don’t like any OS that forces their users to accept AI. Doesn’t mean I’m against AI… I’m not. It’s just that in the current state of things, it’s still way far from good.
Microsoft tried to shove it down their users’ throaths with Copilot already on Windows 10 and now on Windows 11, and there has been some resistance.
I don’t like any kind of system service that gets in the way of everything I do, that’s THE recipe for disaster. Not only on my own personal computer, where I need a clean system, but especially at work where I need an even cleaner system because I’m broadcasting live on an Internet radio station (I mean I’m the guy who handles the console for the audio stream and the computer for the live video stream), so any kind of system service that gets in the way, it would break the whole set up, because of the way AI is designed to work.
I would be OK with a system that would allow me to choose if I want AI or not.
Reading the article in the topic start, it seems the intention for Ubuntu is to start with an opt-in system. They say they’ll always have the option for users to disable all AI features—but let’s see if that hold, I must say I don’t particularly trust Canonical in doing the right thing there.
