Friction in Fedora over AI developer desktop initiative [LWN.net]

By Joe Brockmeier
May 13, 2026

A push by Red Hat employees to create a Fedora "AI Developer Desktop" with support for out-of-tree kernel drivers and AI toolkits has been met with objections from some long-time members of the Fedora community. After more than a month of sometimes heated discussion, the Fedora Council had voted to approve the initiative; however, a last-minute change to vote against the proposal by council member Justin Wheeler has (at least temporarily) sent it back to the drawing board.

The proposal

On March 31, Gordon Messmer, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, proposed the AI Developer Desktop initiative on the Fedora discussion forum. The aim of the initiative is to "build a thriving community around AI technologies" within Fedora. The initiative would focus on the technical hurdles in the way of shipping AI developer tools, enabling hardware; more than that, though, Messmer's proposal is meant to make AI development a major priority for Fedora as a project.

Community initiatives are projects that do not fit "neatly into the biannual Fedora Linux release cycle" and may span several releases. Initiatives are also meant to be goals for the entire project that align with Fedora's mission statement. One example of an initiative is the work to replace Bugzilla and Pagure with Forgejo as Fedora's "Git forge"; the Fedora wiki has a list of completed initiatives as well. Note that initiatives were previously called "objectives", which is the term that Messmer uses. For consistency, we'll stick with "initiative", as that is the current terminology.

Messmer said that much of the work Fedora does is to package applications so that the software requires minimal post-installation configuration to be usable; however, AI tooling often requires more than minimal setup on Fedora. He wants to make things easier for users who wish to work with AI tools by minimizing the amount of post-installation hassle required to get them up and running on Fedora. The platform deliverables he identifies to provide "an operating system image that would improve Fedora as a platform for AI software" would require Fedora to accommodate, if not actually include, out-of-tree kernel modules (NVIDIA's OpenRM, "until the Nova driver is ready") and support for NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA Toolkit. He was clear that there was no plan for adding "applications that inspect or monitor how users interact with the system or otherwise place user privacy at risk", or applications pre-configured to connect to remote AI services.

Fedora's rolling-release kernel, Messmer said, is not well-suited for "the AI space", and called for a Fedora long-term-support (LTS) kernel to avoid problems with out-of-tree kernel software and user-space components that "can be impacted by the changes typical of a kernel minor release". The Fedora project follows the upstream Linux kernel closely and has policy against maintaining multiple kernels. A Fedora release will usually receive many kernel updates, including major versions, during its release cycle. For example, Fedora 42 shipped with the 6.14.0 kernel in April 2025; the current updated kernel for that release (which is almost at the end of its life) is 6.19.14. Fedora's kernel policies currently discourage, but do not entirely prohibit, out-of-tree modules. He said that the initiative would require asking the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) to "revisit policies that prohibit the option of a stable Fedora kernel".

Additionally, he wanted to publish Fedora Atomic variants to support AI workloads, with the CUDA toolkit, around the same time as the Fedora 45 release scheduled for October 2026. "If Fedora cannot distribute this image due to license or policy issues that we can't resolve, I'd like to ask NVIDIA if they would publish the image we build". The Atomic desktops are image-based, which means that it is more complicated for users to install NVIDIA's CUDA package separately. Including the package when the image is built would be much simpler. He linked to a preview build of the desktop along with the configuration files used to build it, as well as a Copr repository with a 6.12 Linux kernel for Fedora 43 containing the out-of-tree NVIDIA module. He proposed himself as the lead of the initiative.

Discussion

Fedora's initiative process requires a discussion phase, which Messmer had initiated with his post on Fedora's forum; if the proposal is well-received by the community, then its lead can proceed to opening a ticket with the council for consideration. So far, the conversation has generated more than 140 comments from more than 30 participants; whether it has been "well-received" has been called into question.

Steve Milner said he liked the idea and proposed plan overall. He wondered if the LTS kernel would be specific to the AI desktop, or if it would be available to other Fedora variants. Messmer replied that he thought it would be useful for many people, not only AI desktop users. He said he often heard complaints about hardware-support regressions after kernel upgrades, and that a stable kernel could also benefit users who needed other out-of-tree modules for VirtualBox or ZFS. He admitted that an additional kernel would present more work for Fedora's quality team, but argued that "the testing process around Fedora kernels today has serious flaws" because the rolling-release kernel "does not align well with the concept of a stable release". Even if users participate in testing days and report regressions, "there just isn't any realistic alternative to shipping the new release series as an update".

Neal Gompa had a number of thoughts to share. He objected to changing Fedora's policy around supporting out-of-tree kernel modules: "the likelihood our user's systems will be considered tainted and ineligible for support from upstream kernel developers goes up significantly." Kernel developers prefer Fedora, he said, because it does not currently support out-of-tree modules.

He had reservations about equating AI specifically with CUDA; Fedora initiatives should encourage a fully open-source-software stack, not to endorse a proprietary one. Building it around CUDA would send "a dark signal that we don't care enough to push for open source driven AI technology stacks". He added that, with his FESCo hat on, he would be strongly against a policy change in favor of a stable Fedora kernel: "your rationale for this is rather weak, since it isn't even needed for OpenRM".

Messmer responded that the OpenRM module works well today, "but there is no guarantee that will be the case at any given point in time". That was the reason he was given for why OpenRM would not be built in Fedora's kernel package. NVIDIA, he said, was mentioned specifically in the proposal because there was work needed to enable NVIDIA hardware, not because the initiative was intended to be CUDA-specific. Other vendors had already provided "more active support or better aligned support". Gompa had also complained that Red Hat was not allocating kernel developers to do significant development of Fedora's kernel; Messmer said that was a reason why the stable kernel was needed.

I'm actually quite surprised to see anyone argue simultaneously that there are not enough developer resources assigned to the rolling kernel release and that the stable kernel isn't useful or desirable. Those seem like contradictory points of view, to me. The latter is the solution to the former.

The Gompa-and-Messmer discussion went on for some time; Gompa continued to emphasize that, unlike the openSUSE and Ubuntu distributions, which had similar corporate sponsorship, Fedora had a single kernel maintainer who is "massively overworked and isn't able to engage on Fedora kernel bugs". It did not matter what kernels Fedora had because Fedora does not have people to fix the problems that users discover: "it doesn't matter if the problem is in 7.0-rc6, 6.19-stable, or 6.18-longterm. They are still not getting fixed". The additional complexity of the packaging, installation, and bootloader infrastructure for multiple kernels did not make sense, he said. "I'm saying this as someone who is maintaining kernel trees and alternative kernel flavors for Fedora Asahi Remix and CentOS Stream Hyperscale: it's a bad place to be, and I would rather not be here if it wasn't absolutely required.".

Clement Verna said that there would be a lot of overlap between Messmer's proposal and what the Universal Blue community was already doing. That project develops Fedora-based images custom-tailored for specific use cases; for example, the Bazzite gaming distribution and Bluefin workstation distribution are part of the project. He said that Fedora could learn a lot from the automation tools being used by Universal Blue, and there could be an "opportunity to consolidate the maintenance effort for an LTS build" as well.

FESCo member Kevin Fenzi asked why Messmer would not do the entire project as a Fedora Remix. Projects can use the "Fedora Remix" branding while shipping third-party software, even proprietary software, so long as the remix does not use official Fedora branding packages. He added that the reason Fedora had a "'one kernel only' rule" was to reduce the maintenance burden. Messmer said that a remix was considered, but he wanted Fedora as a project to take part in community building around AI. "I believe that the communities we promote will promote the project in return."

Philosophical objections

Fabio Valentini, who is also a FESCo member, spoke up on April 27. He apologized for "arriving a bit late to the party", and said that he was not sure he wanted Fedora to make an AI desktop initiative. Fedora is "already being perceived as 'tainted by AI'" due to the council's decision to approve an AI-assisted contributions policy, which was "driving users and contributors away to distributions which are perceived as not drinking the AI Kool-Aid". (LWN covered the discussion in October 2025, prior to the council's decision.) He said an LTS kernel might be interesting, but did not agree with making "anything with 'AI' in its title" an official initiative, and worried that it would further alienate users.

Messner argued that it would call into question whether Fedora was really an open-source project if Fedora decided to nix the project because it had "AI" in the title, rather than due to policies about proprietary software: "that would actually be bad for our reputation". He cited the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition (OSD), which requires that a license "must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor". Valentini said that did not make sense: Fedora has to make decisions "of the 'we could do this, but will not / do not want to do it' kind" if for no other reason than to limit the scope of the project. Choosing not to do something for ethical or philosophical reasons must be a valid reason not to do something.

Fernando Mancera replied that the OSD did not require a project to adopt specific technologies to be considered open source. The decision would be whether Fedora wanted to align itself with and promote a specific use, not about restricting others from pursuing the AI use case. Making something a Fedora initiative implied the project, as a whole, would be focused on its success. "The question is whether Fedora, as a project, should associate its identity and priorities with that field."

Reputational damage

Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta entered the discussion with a lengthy reply. He said that he had "zero evidence in front of me" that people were avoiding Fedora due to AI, and asked to be shown metrics that would support that claim. Fedora has to be "out in front of conversations" even on controversial technologies, and it could not influence conversations it was not part of. He claimed he was "genuinely concerned about the ethical use of AI", but said the best possible future required the Fedora community to be part of the conversation about ethical use of AI.

The people who are going to get us to the better AI future are the people at the start of their journey and see value in the technology and Fedora needs to be influencing those people so they take the technology into an ethical direction that is most congruent with our shared ideals.

He added that, as FPL, he was "absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project that comes with setting up an entirely new output attractive to developers who want to make use of AI tools".

Valentini replied that Spaleta had missed his point; the whole effort could happen without being an official Fedora initiative. There is no mechanism to prevent someone from working on an AI desktop, he just thought it would be better if Fedora did not promote technology that was "deeply problematic", in its current form, as a project initiative.

After taking a week away to let his thoughts settle, Mancera responded again; he agreed that Fedora should let data guide its decisions, but that went both ways. "Otherwise, we risk holding different arguments to different standards." He said he was struggling with Spaleta "expressing no concern about potential reputational impact"; that could be read as dismissing an issue that some Fedora contributors care deeply about. "Even if the change is non-disruptive in a technical sense, it can still influence how the project is perceived and what it signals about Fedora's priorities."

Spaleta responded, in part, that he was not dismissing anyone's concerns, he disagreed with what to do with those feelings. He said he lived in an area that had "the highest density of data centers" and was directly impacted by their power and water usage. But, telling people not to use the technology was not going to work. "Offering people a more ethical version, which they can actively contribute to making better, may help." Mancera replied:

I do not think we can move this forward in a community way. I am withdrawing all my activities in Fedora project starting right now. The present situation in Fedora is clearly not for me.

There was no need, Simon de Vlieger said, for the AI desktop to be an initiative right now. Instead, he suggested, it should be a remix with a special-interest group that built up a community before making it an initiative. If it turned out to be popular and sustaining, then it could become an initiative. He felt that it was being treated as "a train that must leave the station" to the disregard of community members and their concerns.

Spaleta continued to argue that an AI developer desktop was strategically important to Fedora. "I believe that the base image that comes out of this work needs to be an edition with its own working group in the 2028 timeframe."

Council

While the discussion raged on, Wheeler announced that the council had discussed the initiative on May 6. The council had voted to approve it (six in favor, none opposed) as a 12-month initiative led by Messmer with Spaleta as its executive sponsor. Gompa was unhappy with the council "essentially ignoring the community discussion", and said that the proposal was not acceptable to the community to approve as-is. "I'm especially disappointed at how we're being told that as our opinions and interests in the project as highly engaged contributors do not matter."

On May 8, Wheeler changed his vote to -1. The council requires full consensus to pass significant decisions, which means that a council member can halt the process and require discussion. Based on "recent public and private feedback, we do not yet have the necessary consensus to proceed". He said that feedback from Fedora's kernel experts had not been sufficiently integrated into the plan. "I am casting this vote to ensure we build a structurally sustainable initiative that succeeds without alienating or burning out our core experts."

Wheeler changed the date for the council ticket to May 22, and said that he was optimistic that the council could come to a decision "without a deadlock and FPL override" before then. According to the council's charter, the FPL can "'unstick' things if consensus genuinely cannot be reached" and a decision must be made.

Spaleta has firmly planted a stake in the ground that Fedora should be involved in the "AI conversation", as it were. It does not seem to be enough to do the technical work to make Fedora suitable for working with AI technologies; the project has to send a message that it's in favor of such things.

There is clearly a top-down push from Fedora's corporate sponsor to be AI-friendly, which is not surprising since the company is all-in on AI. Last year, Red Hat vice president of core platforms, Mike McGrath, weighed in on the AI-assisted contributions discussion to complain about Fedora's governing bodies being well-known for what they do not want. He wanted to see Fedora "leading and shaping the future and saying 'AI, our doors are open, let's invent the future again'".

Ultimately, it seems likely this initiative will be approved in some form. The pressure for Fedora to accept and embrace AI as part of its identity seems destined to continue until the project moves in the direction its sponsor wants—or until the winds change, bubble pops, or AI becomes yesterday's news. Since the AI craze is probably not going to go away soon, odds are Fedora will be making room for it sooner than later.

to post comments

Atomic Image

Posted May 13, 2026 17:16 UTC (Wed) by spmfox (subscriber, #125241) [Link] (5 responses)

Isn't this exactly the type of thing a bootc image could solve?

Bazzite already proved this, and I'm doing something similar myself using Fedora + bootc + ZFS.

Just publish a image with all this non-free stuff added in top of vanilla Fedora. I use Fedora version n-1 to get around the Kernel being updated frequently. It works great.

I don't understand why any ideals need to be compromised or policies need to be rewritten when we literally have the tools and the pipelines to make this happen and it's never been easier.

Atomic Image

Posted May 13, 2026 18:57 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

That's more or less what the idea is, but the reason this is getting so heated is that to some folks at least, doing that as part of "Fedora" (as opposed to doing it downstream from Fedora under a different name) *is* compromising ideals and rewriting policies. Since one of the Fedora foundations is Freedom - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/#_freedom - and we have historically been dead against official "Fedora" things containing non-free stuff.

It *is* allowable under current policies for something to call itself a "Fedora Remix" and include non-free stuff. I don't think it's entirely clear that the letter of any laws/policies/ideals would be violated by the existence of a "Fedora initiative" whose actual output was a "Fedora remix" with non-free stuff in it. But it's clearly something that some folks are not happy with and consider as being outside the historic expectations.

Atomic Image

Posted May 14, 2026 2:29 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Sometimes it helps to make exceptional and temporary concessions / "tactical retreats".

I mean: exceptionally let IBM put an official "Fedora" sticker on all the AI stuff they love, while making sure at the more technical level (that marketing can't understand) that this is all still built "downstream" as a remix and does not fundamentally change the maintenance effort or anything technical.

In other words: be pragmatic and don't fight the AI religion with anti-AI religion.

After a while, usage metrics and user feedback will eventually allow decisions actually data-driven.

Atomic Image

Posted May 13, 2026 18:57 UTC (Wed) by ffmancera (subscriber, #177137) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, you are completely right.. but then they won't have the shiny AI thing.

Although it is not supposed to be about AI despite the word being in the title. :/

If only OpenCL worked well

Posted May 13, 2026 19:54 UTC (Wed) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link]

OpenCL and Vulkan are the cross-platform, portable solutions. Sadly, they don’t offer alternatives to Nvidia’s heavily optimized libraries.

Atomic Image

Posted May 14, 2026 13:41 UTC (Thu) by fw (subscriber, #26023) [Link]

Generating the images locally also has the advantage that they are customized to what you actually need. Generic images supporting different GPUs/GPU vendors will be very, very large.

Seriously?

Posted May 13, 2026 19:59 UTC (Wed) by valderman (subscriber, #56479) [Link] (14 responses)

But, telling people not to use the technology was not going to work.

I have a hard time believing this argument was made in good faith. The issue isn't that users want even more "AI" in every aspect of their lives and need someone to tell them that's a bad idea; the issue is that users emphatically do not want to that, despite software vendors trying their best to convince them that they do.

Besides, telling people not to use certain types of software (like, say, proprietary software) is very much something Linux distributions are doing, regardless of whether it works or not. If Spaleta wants to argue honestly for more "AI" software in Fedora, he should make an argument for "AI" being a net positive - or at least being less harmful than proprietary software - instead of claiming that users want "AI" so Fedora has to comply.

The proposal itself isn't all that alarming to me (though I'm not a fan of bending over backwards to accommodate proprietary software), but Spaleta's response to it raises all sorts of red flags. Reading between the lines, I would not be surprised to see Fedora start picking up "features" along the lines of ~~Clippy~~ ~~Bonzi Buddy~~ Copilot sooner rather than later.

Seriously?

Posted May 13, 2026 23:18 UTC (Wed) by gordonmessmer (guest, #182696) [Link] (13 responses)

> I would not be surprised to see Fedora start picking up "features" along the lines of Clippy Bonzi Buddy Copilot sooner rather than later.

I don't think there's any reason to expect that.

The features you're talking about are "GenAI Service" features. They are added to commercial products because the developer expects to charge money for them in the future and to generate revenue by doing so.

Fedora isn't providing any services, so it isn't generating revenue from them. No one has any motivation to add those features where they aren't wanted. No one would benefit from it, especially the project.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 8:57 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

There a many freely available models which are getting better all the time. As the technology improves the kinds of models you can run locally on your laptop will keep improving. Maybe not in the next year, but it will come eventually.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 15:20 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (11 responses)

FWIW, when writing the article, I thought it was explicit that you'd included in your non-goals things like AI services and LLM-powered applications by default. Reading it again, it still seems to me that that was your intent, but it specifically talks about privacy and remote services, but does not rule out a local LLM-driven application as I read it.

In other words, one could find wiggle room for working LLM-driven features into Fedora if they run from on-device models rather than (say) calling out to Claude or whatnot the way that the current proposal is written. If that's not the intent (and I'm guessing it is not), then the proposal could be modified to say so explicitly.

As I understand it and read the proposal, your responses, and Jef's responses, the drivers here are:

Create something Fedora-based that makes it easier to develop CUDA applications, etc.
To do so specifically as a Fedora initiative under the "Fedora Project" name with Fedora community blessing.

It is the second one that seems to be the real sticking point for many on both sides. I mean, Universal Blue is already doing some or all of the first. There's plenty of room to do that as a remix without any need for council blessing.

Particularly from Jef's responses, and earlier comments from McGrath and others, I get the sense that it is not sufficient from Red Hat/IBM's POV to have a thing that works to do AI development based on Fedora bits: it must be a thing that Fedora proper is working toward as a project as a Fedora AI Initiative™ with an eye to having an edition later on.

In other words, the real crux of the biscuit seems to be whether Fedora puts its blessing on something AI with all that entails; endorsing LLM-driven development/projects, rethinking its stance around out-of-tree kernel modules, and specifically enabling proprietary stacks like CUDA. Fedora, as a community-driven project, says "no thanks, we don't want anything with Fedora AI™ as its name on it" doesn't seem to be an acceptable result here. Rejecting, say, "Vigor-LLM enabled editing" as a feature might be allowed.

But, perhaps I am misunderstanding.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 15:37 UTC (Thu) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

Do biscuits have cruxes?

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 15:43 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Sorry. A Frank Zappa reference got loose there.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 15:39 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (8 responses)

Related to that is that the only concrete bit of the proposal I can find so far boils down to "make it easier to run proprietary software stacks on your NVidia hardware, via a kernel that supports NVidia proprietary userspace, and some better tools for running containers with that proprietary userspace atop that kernel".

If there were things like easier ways to run models from Hugging Face on your open source ROCm/OneAPI/Vulkan/OpenCL stack, or even packaging up ZLUDA so people on non-NVidia hardware can use CUDA projects, it might feel less controversial. But there's a distinct lack of concrete things other than "open source userspace for AI is bad, so we should lean into proprietary userspace support, because the Fedora Freedom foundational principle is less important than AI", which is concerning from a distance.

Now, I've not otherwise joined in the conversation, so I may be missing something here, but it really does feel like this is "AI as motivation to abandon Free Software", not "push forward Free Software as the basis for your AI world".

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 16:47 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> But there's a distinct lack of concrete things other than "open source userspace for AI is bad, so we should lean into proprietary userspace support, because the Fedora Freedom foundational principle is less important than AI", which is concerning from a distance.

It may be "concerning" from a distance, but up close it feels more like a rug pull after getting slapped in the face.

>Now, I've not otherwise joined in the conversation, so I may be missing something here, but it really does feel like this is "AI as motivation to abandon Free Software", not "push forward Free Software as the basis for your AI world".

In theory, it's the latter. But in practice.... it will be the former.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 17:12 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

But there's a distinct lack of concrete things other than "open source userspace for AI is bad, so we should lean into proprietary userspace support, because the Fedora Freedom foundational principle is less important than AI", which is concerning from a distance.

It should come as no surprise that a Free Software operating system is a casualty when the major goal is to play nicely with proprietary LLMs. Yes, there might be some value to a system that could be used for local LLM development, but we all know the big goal is to work well when using the big players like OpenAI and Anthropic, who aren't even close to Free Software. The only reason to care about a FOSS OS is because it's cheap and customizable, not because there's any philosophical attachment to Free Software.

it really does feel like this is "AI as motivation to abandon Free Software", not "push forward Free Software as the basis for your AI world".

I might be a tiny bit more generous and classify this as "AI is all that matters" rather than "AI as motivation to abandon Free Software", but it certainly comes from a place of not caring about Free Software values.

Seriously?

Posted May 15, 2026 0:31 UTC (Fri) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

"Yes, there might be some value to a system that could be used for local LLM development, but we all know the big goal is to work well when using the big players like OpenAI and Anthropic, who aren't even close to Free Software."

Well, no, it really isn't.

You don't even have to buy our bona fides for this. Just ask yourself that: how does that help RH or IBM? RH / IBM don't have a good way to make money off people directly using frontier models from other companies.

RH *can* make money off people running models on hardware they control, so it makes sense that this is what RH would want to enable.

Aside from that, just look at the proposal; most of the concrete bits are ultimately about making CUDA work. Which you don't need at all if you're just going to have OpenAI / Anthropic run the model for you.

Finally, there's no need for an "objective" to make it possible to use model providers like OpenAI / Anthropic on Fedora. You already can. I mean, they're really just web services. There isn't really anything for operating system developers to *do* to enable the use of remote model providers. We already give you a network connection and a bunch of text editors and programming languages and shells and web browsers. What else would you need?

Seriously?

Posted May 15, 2026 7:56 UTC (Fri) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

This is a good argument for including the proprietary bits in RHEL. It doesn't seem to have much to do with Fedora however.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 18:27 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> If there were things like easier ways to run models from Hugging Face on your open source ROCm/OneAPI/Vulkan/OpenCL stack

Uhm... I'm using Ollama Web-UI running in a podman container on a machine with dual AMD R9700 on stock Fedora. It just works. I can just select a model from the dropdown menu, load it, and it will run as long as it fits in RAM/VRAM.

NVidia is still ahead when you want to squeeze every last drop of performance with custom kernels, but for casual use it's not at all needed.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 19:06 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

That was just an example of the sorts of things they could be offering if there was more to the proposal than "make it easier to run proprietary userspace on a Fedora system", not something that was definitely hard today.

Seriously?

Posted May 14, 2026 19:27 UTC (Thu) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the irony here is that it's *already* rather easy to "run models from Hugging Face on your open source ROCm/OneAPI/Vulkan/OpenCL stack", because it's all open and there already. Pretty much just do 'dnf install ollama' or 'dnf install ramalama' and have at it. We don't need an objective for that because it's just...software. We know how to package software! We've been doing it for a while!

This was the point I was sort of trying to make with my "outside of the kernel module / CUDA stuff, what *is* this?" post - that it feels weird because we're calling it an "AI" objective but in practice it winds up being a lot about "NVIDIA hardware enablement" because that's the only part of it that's actually at all difficult or different from "just packaging software", which we've been doing forever.

Proprietary software enablement, not hardware

Posted May 15, 2026 10:57 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Yeah - that's kinda my point. When you strip this proposal down to the concrete actions that will be taken, it's just "we should enable people to use NVidia's proprietary userspace on Fedora", and nothing else - calling it "hardware enablement" isn't really accurate, either, because it's not just about enabling the use of NVidia hardware, but about enabling the use of NVidia's proprietary APIs, too.

I would feel very differently about it if it was (say) "we're going to make ZLUDA work on all the big Mesa Vulkan drivers so that you could use CUDA code on AMD, Intel or NVidia hardware", or even "we're going to support running ML models on NVidia proprietary Vulkan to the same extent they're supported on RADV and ANV". But instead, it's "well, NVidia's proprietary CUDA userspace is popular, so we should support that".

This is literally the point of a remix

Posted May 13, 2026 22:13 UTC (Wed) by jpeisach (subscriber, #181966) [Link]

The idea of a remix is that you are creating an alternative environment for users upon the same base system. I don't know why AI deserves the special treatment at a time when the desktop is not made for AI - nor is there demand for AI agents to run around the desktop (except by crazy people).

AI or proprietary software?

Posted May 14, 2026 10:55 UTC (Thu) by stefanha (subscriber, #55072) [Link] (2 responses)

The discussion about the pros and cons of AI is a distraction. There is already plenty of open source and proprietary AI software that runs fine on Fedora.

This Fedora AI Desktop sounds like a vehicle to ship the worst of the worst proprietary software that is so invasive that it doesn't even work reliably on vanilla Fedora.

Enabling this kind of software is not in the long term interest of Fedora because it encourages the creation of more of this kind of software to the detriment of users and the open source community.

AI or proprietary software?

Posted May 14, 2026 14:09 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, plenty does already work... With "tedious configuration".
Go back to the beginning. The intent is to eliminate that "tedious configuration".

AI is simply the current "evil" bugaboo. Unleash the evil?!!?! Oh nooooosssss!!!!!

AI or proprietary software?

Posted May 14, 2026 21:31 UTC (Thu) by stefanha (subscriber, #55072) [Link]

> AI is simply the current "evil" bugaboo. Unleash the evil?!!?! Oh nooooosssss!!!!!

You didn't read my comment. It's not about AI.

Part of the conversation?

Posted May 14, 2026 14:18 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (1 responses)

[Spaleta said] Fedora has to be "out in front of conversations" even on controversial technologies, and it could not influence conversations it was not part of.

It seems a bit disingenuous to imply that someone can't "be part of the conversation" if the thing they're saying is that AILLM-based technologies as they are widely deployed today are deeply unethical and should generally be avoided, and that they're staying away from it. Even if that's a position you don't agree with, to suggest that anyone with that opinion won't be listened to, and shouldn't even be listened to, is... unsettling.

Part of the conversation?

Posted May 14, 2026 21:12 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

Is it so surprising? You don't invite a Windows user that complains that Linux is hard to use to discuss the future of Linux. You don't invite a C++ user who complains that Rust is unnecessarily complicated to discuss the future of Rust.

People want to discuss with people who provide constructive feedback. If Fedora's position is that LLM's are unethical then anyone involved with the future of LLM's will note that and go talk to someone else.

Richard Stallman has many opinions but don't think people pay a lot of attention to them.

Now if Fedora was putting effort into making ethical LLM's easier to use, that might help. But simply telling everyone they're doing it wrong is unlikely to win anyone over.

Red Hat are what they are...

Posted May 24, 2026 9:11 UTC (Sun) by LyonJE (guest, #139567) [Link]

A passing non-technical observation, but seeing:

> "There is clearly a top-down push from Fedora's corporate sponsor to be AI-friendly..."

struck me as being at the core of this, and hence the remark about not being able to move things forward in a "community way".

I comprehensively ditched all involvement with Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS years ago when Red Hat's policy-making effectively reversed/withdraw a previously publicly stated-in-writing EOL support date. When the corporate sponsor starts doing things like that, the rest is fairly predictable. Even without an LLM to tell us.
_

History shows us that being a voice near the beginning of technological developments can result in that shaping things longer-term; but it's not a given, many voices are drowned out or fall away even when they're the 'better' approach, just because power often overrides correctness, and from time to time we've seen a body plough into something late on in the day after others have paid extensively for the early development and exploration.

It seems fundamentally naïve to think that one corporate sponsor can somehow steer things by doing something technically sensible. The time, money and effort would eb more effective (though ethically questionable) spent on lobbying.

I'm not surprised people might make decisions to cease their involvement and support. I'm sure others with a different set of values, goals & beliefs will join up to be part of the stampede.