I've been warning people about Canonical and their bad decisions for over a decade, and even I didn't expect this one.

[dekablack@mastodon.social]

@bodil AI in Linux.WTF????

[crow@cville.online]

@bodil @kernelvoid But would that mean #zorin will end up infected witih #aislop?

[vantablack2000@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@bodil What does this mean for distros built on Ubuntu like Mint? Will they have AI features too or will that be up to the distro?

I am currently using Mint and I REALLY don't want to use an operating system that is going to start adding AI features. At the very least with Linux I would hope it is easy to disable at least.

[oldfartphil@mastodon.social]

@crow @bodil #Debian was the easiest transition for me when I moved away from Ubuntu. Aside from dealing with Debian's old-school installer (depending on the installation method you choose) and having to add a couple of Gnome Shell extensions, you'll hardly notice a difference in day to day use.

[oggie@woof.group]

@bodil

to use a simpsons-ism, 'Why now? Why not years ago?'

To be clear, fuck AI and all this stuff, but if you ARE going to weirdly sell out and do shitty things, why wait till the sentiment is FIRMLY against it? Like 2 years ago there was probably a window where people would have been 'okay I guess' as an optional feature.

Now, fortunatley, basically everyone is on team 'HELL NO', so...just seems a baffling choice!

[bodil@social.treehouse.systems]

@VANTABlack2000 I wouldn't expect something like Mint, which is already pretty far removed from Ubuntu's default setup, to automatically adopt Ubuntu's worse choices in this case, but I don't know the specifics of what Canonical is planning to ship, so I can't say for sure.

[zebidijah@mastodon.social]

@bodil this could legitimately be awesome!

.....but it won't. because it's canonical....

if they shipped an optional expanded version, that included small local llm (like 2b or 4b-ish sized) trained only and exclusively help you troubleshoot and script, that would be awesome!
i don't need it to write me a workout routine or draw me a stupid picture, i need it to show me im a fucking idiot who expected 'ip' command to behave the same was as the 'ls' does in terms of syntax

[bodil@social.treehouse.systems]

@zebidijah Idk what exactly they're planning, but the words "agentic workflows" have been said, so I'm expecting the worst.

[zebidijah@mastodon.social]

@crow @bodil

'what distro should i....' stop. the answer is always Mint. if you are not sure which distro is for you, then mint is the distro for you. in the context of this conversation, LMDE (Debian edition)

[raven667@hachyderm.io]

@bodil I wasn't really thinking about Canonical, but this makes perfect sense. They've always struggled to build any community around their development (mostly because of their CLA), the name "Canonical" has always been an ironic joke, so they've never had the resources to generate code to match their ambition, but with LLM-based statistical code generation they *do*. They have a sycophantic agent to replace the community they could never have and can generate a castle of ambition built out of all the low-quality code they want.

[zebidijah@mastodon.social]

@bodil same.... i feel like it's probably going to be a direct partnership with either openAI or Anthropic

with lots of loud and splashy announcements to maximize 'shareholder value' 🤮

[kernelvoid@mastodon.social]

@crow @bodil yes, I advise you use #archLinux though the installation process and the maintenance is a pain but it's worth it

[schrotthaufen@mastodon.social]

@raphael @bodil And the “Please write an essay why you like Shuttleworth. This is not a cult. Promise!” part of the application process.

[phosphenes@mastodon.social]

@bodil @VANTABlack2000

When Ubuntu made the bad decision to look like a phone everywhere with Unity, Mint went the opposite direction. So maybe Mint has more sense.

[soph@grrl.me]

@bodil

Sigh. Wish I could say I was surprised, but they've been going the wrong way for a while now.

I took a look at Aurora, but unfortunately I don't see an easy way to get an ISO for ARM64. In 2026, that feels like a nonstarter for any serious distro.

[bodil@social.treehouse.systems]

@soph I can't agree, ARM isn't really statistically significant for distro makers below a certain scale. I'm told Fedora baseline has good ARM support.

[soph@grrl.me]

@bodil possibly, though I tend to think not in overall numbers, but in groups of users. I know a lot of devs with mac machines because they're efficient for builds. An intel/amd-only distro is going to perform far slower as a VM on a mac than a ARM64 distro would, for example.

[bodil@social.treehouse.systems]

@soph That's probably not the kind of distro I'd want to recommend people install on their Ubuntu laptops, though.

[anathema@girlcock.club]

@bodil I switched to CachyOS in January and I’ve been very happy with it

[janl@narrativ.es]

@soph @bodil this is why I didn’t give Aurora a spin.