AI in Linux: Luddites or Revolutionists

[00:00:06]Welcome back to Switch to Linux. It is great to be back in the office after our brief trip away. And I do want to jump right back in talking a little bit about AI and Linux to see some of the chatter that has been going on and provide a few of my opinions about what may be going on in this world. And um we are actually going to start by mentioning this article here from uh it's Foss. And uh in this article here it says Lionus Torvald spent years dismissing AI only to vouch for it. I think that the title itself of this article is a little just a little disingenuous. And the reason I bring that up is because, you know, people are allowed to change their opinions and people are allowed to wait for more information because Lionus Torvalds in the past right when AI was ramping up notably stopped to slow down to wait to see what would happen in those early days and not quite as much now, but in those early days AI was all hype. Everyone's like, "AI, it's so amazing. It can do absolutely everything." And then you get the most nonsense garbage pushed out of it you can possibly imagine. And while it is getting better and we are starting to understand a little bit better about, you know, what are better positive uses of AI versus more negative uses of AI, these are kind of important things for us to stop and consider. And uh in this article here they're kind of going through the history of Lionus Torvald's ideas and uh you know starting by making his the statement he said is AI is 90% marketing and was it 90% marketing I think is 10% reality is what the statement was and you know you have to remember that he was making some of these discussions back in 2023. Dude, AI was brand new. Um, uh, let's see. I think it was 2024 is when Lionus Torvaldz actually said that at one of the the events. And the thing is is that AI moves so progressively fast. And you younger people in the audience may not understand that how fast technology is moving these days. You know, we had when I was a kid, we had, you know, eight tracks were on their way out and cassette tapes came in and we, you know, cassette tapes dominated our means of listening to music from, you know, the the time we could remember in the the early 80s on up until, you know, CDs kind of started to roll out, but any new technology, any new invention took a long time for the technology to catch on. And so while CDs were initially released and you could get a few of the biggest blockbusters on CD in in the in the uh late 80s early 90s most people did not have CD players until the mid9s.

[00:03:04]Uh I mean I was the cutting edge of m movies. I had laser discs and DVDs. I had one of the first ever models of a DVD player on a computer. It required two separate cards. I had to have the the DVD player itself and I had to buy a separate uh PCI decoder card for it. It was like several hundred back in uh late 1990s money in order to run DVDs. And that was of course just playing them, not recording them. And then, you know, CDs came out, even the MP3 technology rolled out very slowly. and and uh as newer technologies and newer versions of things are rolling out the technology is snowballing itself that the AI you know three four years ago in fact I think I don't even think AI is what four years old now is it three or four years old since chat GBT was first released the first consumer model of an AI and now we're to the point where we can do AI models to do just about everything and we can't we don't always understand, especially in this crazy world where, you know, you see somebody you don't like and then you dig through their Twitter feeds and 14 years ago he said something that's uncouthed by standards now that wasn't 14 years ago and then we want to cancel a guy over something he said over a decade ago. Well, the thing is is that the things in our world change and progress and that's what Lionus Torvalds is mentioning because ultimately it boils down to he's at a conference recently and there was uh he said there's a lot of anti- AI sentiment and he says you know just uh down here he says just fork it or walk away. Uh now this is here's the balance here because remember Linux released guidelines that you could use AI for portions of doing your coding like so suppose that you know that you need to run a for loop with 18 different variations. Do we really have to manually code out 18 variations? You can can you tell the AI hey write a for loop with these 18 variations? the thing spits out the code and if you are a good programmer you can look at this code and you can evaluate of course if you're a good programmer you may not be doing a for loop with 18 conditions but you know I'm not a coder what can I say that you know my my C++ classes from the '9s are starting to show what can I say uh but the the point is is that there's portions if you're doing coding right you can use AI for some of the more repetitive among tasks You know, if you could train a monkey to hit the keys and go, give me a banana, then uh you can probably train the AI to do such things. And so, we don't necessarily want to completely banish it in those rudimentary cases. But what we want to avoid is people coming in with no real coding experience with a grand idea and going, I got a great idea. I don't know how to program. Hey, AI vibe code this. And then you submit it right to the patch. that still remains uh outside the scope of what the Linux team is going to accept. All right? So, everybody is still responsible for everything. And so, this isn't him changing his mind and and according to the article here, he spent years dismissing it only to vouch for it. No, he is seeing the way it can be used and the way it can't be used and helping to establish rules and guidelines by which AI could be used. Now, do I think that AI is going to destroy society?

[00:06:43]Absolutely. But, you know, I'd rather I'd rather be in more in the upper echelons than the lower echelons when that destruction comes, you know. Uh, and so we have to recognize the appropriate uses versus the disappropriate uses, you know. And I use AI for a couple tiny things on completely uh self um self-hosted models. And that is the type of stuff that if you get good at it, in fact, the one of the reasons I'm doing some of that is one of my clients does blog posts and we used to pay them a certain amount of money and then he looks down and says, "Hey, there's this AI that could do this." And so he fires the person writing the post, which is horrible. Well, if I don't have some degree of, "Hey, we got to make these things better, I'm going to get fired then, too, you know." And so I said when of course he was just like, "Hey, give me an article on this." And then no other further prompts or anything else and sending me a chat GBT's typical like 300 words of deeply bulletointed nonsense. And I'd be like, I can't use this. But it's like, you know what? Let me set up my own AI server. Let me do proper prompt engineering feed into the system. I'm still charging the same amount. So, we were still able to cut our cost down by 20 uh about what 20 bucks or so per post, but we still get good quality posts that I feed in with proper prompt engineering and get a proper type of article and I make sure it's edited and I make sure it's good.

[00:08:13]That is a case where AI can be useful.

[00:08:18]And so, that really is where he's getting at is recognizing places that it can be useful while also recognizing that it can indeed destroy the world.

[00:08:27]And the people that are like absolutely no AI, absolutely anywhere ever and ever and ever forever. Amen.

[00:08:34]At that point in time, you got to stop and say, "I don't know what to tell you." And would we be better off without it? Absolutely. But the toothpaste is out of the tube, the catch is out of the bag, and good luck getting any of them back in. And that's really where he is getting at. But AI itself has caused a lot of other problems because this was a fascinating article from OMG Iuntu looking at Flathub of course basically banned anybody from just submitting AI slop and uh this actually is an interesting article because uh they looked at these AI submitted things because you know you get this grand idea and then you push it out and then you never update it and you never keep up with it and it doesn't become a project And people just think you vibe code something one time and you think, "Oh, it it it's done. It's done.

[00:09:25]I don't have to do anything with it."

[00:09:27]And doing some research, what uh some people found is that the vast majority of AI coded programs, they never get any updates. They never uh they never remain active. They they come out with some neat idea. They push themselves out and then all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of people are using them and then nobody ever pushes an update. security vulnerabilities all through them because you know they were vibe coded. And then what ends up happening is we have radically insecure systems because of abandonware taking over platforms.

[00:10:00]And so uh when Flub banned AI coded app submissions last month, some critics warned the platform was denying the future by dismissing a new wave of vibecoded software as outandout slop.

[00:10:12]And uh what happened though is Linux developer um I will probably not get this name right is it Evangelos Paticuris uh developed uh tuba turntable and others did some digging around. He looked at 120 code repositories whose poll requests uh for inclusion on flatub were rejected because of the heavy AI usage given an AI slop tag. Of all of those that were rejected, 88 of them are under no active development at all and many have been deleted. Only 32 32 of them still are showing signs of life, making it a 73% abandon rate for this software. So that is really a challenge that when you have a platform that allows people to just come on in and just dump a bunch of data uh dump an application and then you don't think about updates and security changes and vibe code hallucinations and and other things then what ends up happening is people start installing it and then you're just like I don't have time to deal with that and it becomes abandoned wear and it's never updated and then we have a situation where otherwise what could be good code turns out to be, you know, something that u that produces a a way for malware and infections or or vulnerabilities to be introduced into your computer at large.

[00:11:34]And so they actually did a pretty good job here. So they were looking at uh they were looking here at um uh abandonware in an article there. Uh but uh what I thought of when I read this article immediately is way back a decade ago when I was talking about the dangers of snaps and yes we're going to keep on coming back to this because you know even it's foss did an article saying I was trying to spread fear uncertainty and doubt and one of the things I had actually said in one of my videos was that the snap store is going to start looking like the Windows store. If you remember back in the Windows store with the phone with Windows 8.0 0 and 8.1 first came out, a whole lot of people that didn't seem to have any real good experience started developing a whole lot of uh programs and dumping them into the Windows Store and then people were just like, "Oh, that's cool. Oh, that's cool. That's cool." And you end up with a whole bunch of junk that never got updated and then it never seems to be cleared out. And I actually said, "Hey, this is going to be a problem." Well, guess what? If you go on over to the snap store and the one thing that I remember using as my example was simple screen recorder, but you can go to any iuntu based distribution that still uses snaps and you can install either of two these two unofficial versions of simple screen recorder. Neither of these is put together with the acknowledgement or endorsement of the original uh author of Simple Screen Recorder. Uh they both appear to be just Chinese developers and I have not seen any evidence that they're with any major projects. Um so here is uh here's this one here. Uh this one here has last been updated over a decade almost a decade ago, excuse me, May of 2017. It is now August of 2026.

[00:13:23]Um, you know, at some point in time, maybe Snap should simply remove Snap applications that have not been updated in, I don't know, a decade. Can we please remove this out so some poor person doesn't come by, install this nonsense, and be like, "Our burner sucks." I mean, Auntu sucks. We can agree with that. We probably don't. I know I'm making fun of Auntu. There's times and places for it. Um, but, you know, Tuxedo Linux disagrees anyway. Uh but anyway, uh when an application like this has not been updated, which which by the way, the the Auntu doesn't even ship with X anymore.

[00:14:02]Maybe get the X dependent apps also out of Auntu. It won't work either. Uh the other one is a little bit better. This is the other simple screen recorder.

[00:14:11]This is that unofficial one. Uh and so this one here, there's actually two versions. They we look at this. We have a latest update of November of 2026, less than a year ago. That's good. Uh we're getting it there. Um but uh it is still uh it is still a a snap package uh for an application or for a a DRO that has dropped uh X the core component of it. And I'm and I haven't installed this to see I'm I'm a little scared to if I'm if I'm honest. Uh but the challenge here is that you have a lot of this type of uh of software that this one here at least has been updated in the last year.

[00:14:52]This one here 20 2017 let's get this out of here. And that is exactly what FlatHub is trying to avoid is this circumstance whereby um people can just dump a bunch of stuff in here and then forget about it and then now Flatpack is going to be stuck with all this software and then there's problems if you remove it and then do you pull it from somebody's s system or do you allow it to just sit there and even though it's a vulnerability and then somebody gets a malware infection by an an insecure flatp pack and then They start blaming Flatpack for it. Well, they were in a situation where, okay, I either have to to go in and pull the thing off like, you know, Amazon pulling 1984 off of people's Kindles, which was parody in real life itself. Yes, that really happened. uh or they have to run into a situation where they fill their platform full of so much abandonware that it becomes this hotbed of of vulnerabilities and back doors like the snap store. [laughter] So, I think that they uh I do agree with um the sentiments here of OMG Abuntu that they actually did a pretty good job to say, "Yeah, we just won't don't want vibecoded crap in and flatub." But hey, you know what? Flatpack is really cool.

[00:16:12]You are perfectly able to create your own flatpack-based uh repository. And with your flatpack-based repository, you are absolutely welcome to install any form of junk in there that you want. Uh, and you know, it's just not in flatp pack, [laughter] so not not in the the flat hub. Anyway, uh, so let me know your thoughts about all this. Do you agree with the team absolutely no AI in Linux ever, or do you agree with the yeah, it can be used in appropriate times? Let me know your thoughts and a little bit of friendly debate in the comments down below. Thanks for watching and I hope that you enjoy switching to Linux.