this weekend, KDE’s annual conference will take place at Graz University of Technology in Austria with an AI-native desktop proposal is likely to divide attendees.
The response from the KDE’s social media team to Gerard:
Please note that a random talk in Akademy does not in any way mean an endorsement from the community. Neither speaker have contributed to the project in many, many years, and it is ridiculous and even deceitful to imply that this is in any way an official strategy that KDE is going to pursue.
David Gerard’s response to that response:
bro it’s out there with your name on it, it’s not “deceitful” to notice the URL and logos.
if you go straight to claiming commenting about the contents of your own damn website - and you’re responding literally to me linking it - is “deceitful”, a hit dog is hollering.
instead, please describe the process by which such an AI slop proposal - clearly chatbot spam - even gets this far.
In which KDE didn’t bother to answer and proceeded to block David Gerard.
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117276666726477078
Not a good look.
They make a fair point, but who platforms the speakers? If I proposed a talk about adding pornographic wallpapers to KDE, you know, just for the people who want to use it, would they platform me too?
Maybe if they were AI-generated you’d get some traction?
Deleted by moderator
I heard that the courts ruled it’s legal now as long as you generate it with AI first. I wish I was joking.
Yeah that shit doesn’t fly when they locked the topic discussing a possible future AI policy. I think they already made up their mind and are manufacturing consent for a fully slopified KDE future.
That’s a very uncharitable view of a mod locking down a heated discussion because they don’t want to deal with it anymore. There’s also KDE devs in that thread who are anti-AI, so I don’t know why you’re concluding they’ve ‘made up their mind’.
With the way things are going right now in FOSS circles, KDE both allowing this talk at akademy, and locking down discussion critical of AI, I don’t really have much capacity left for charitable interpretations of their actions. The discussion in the mailing list linked above also doesn’t make me hopeful.
In that same Mastodon thread:
what is the official strategy of KDE regaring “AI”?
There isn’t one… yet.
There is an ongoing discussion started here
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2026-September/124095.html
David Gerard said “KDE Conf just wants to talk about going full AI slop desktop”.
So… where’s the inaccuracy (let alone “deceit”) in anything David Gerard said?
(Question not necessarily directed at squirrel. More rhetorical and directed at whoever wrote those comments on that official(?) KDE mastodon account.)
Well, there is a big difference between “someone submitted a talk about going full AI to the KDE conference” and “the KDE conference wants to have a talk about going full AI and this is probably what the leadership wants and is just looking to get rubber stamped”.
Imagine if someone made a post called “I think the lemmy.world admins should sell out to Meta and make big money” and this was reported as “lemmy.world is debating selling out to Meta; this is probably what the admins wanted to do all along”.
The core of the matter may be true but the way it’s talked about is anything but accurate.
the leadership
David Gerard never said anything about the leadership of KDE. And KDE is “talking” about whether to slop it up or not.
That’s what’s great with projects like KDE. They’re run by programmers who can tell what this charlatan is pushing for is bullshit, not businessmen who would gobble all of those shiny empty promises up and drive their organization into the ground with it.
Fucking christ, I might have to swap distro if they push this.
You don’t have to swap distro. Just change your DE.
That’s what I meant. Linux noob.
Read the comment by squirrel
river + rhine is cool
I literally just switched off of river cause i wanted something more “just works” after hopping arround for a while and now this. Guess im going back…
Who proposed this? Was it some unmentionable Danish guy with long hair and an even longer ego?
I Assumed that KDE are likely to go this way, and already plan to return to XFCE, or to no idea what
I’m not aware of my distros plans though…
XFCE is already a lost cause. The new window manager for wayland is slop coded.
fml
I was holding off on going back to xfce due to them apparently still not being on top of wayland
Going to have to revisit all the de’s again apparently. I started with xfce only a few years ago, eventually moved to kde, not seeing the point of any of the other ones I tried along the way.
river is cool and pretty anti-slop
Harder to setup than Plasma or XFCE though.
I have extensively researched most DE’s stance on AI/LLMs.
Virtually all of them allow AI code contributions.
KDE, Gnome, MATE, Xfce, Cosmic, Budgie, TDE (Trinity), LXQt, Qtile, i3… All of them use or allow AI code.
The only major DE I’m unsure about is Cinnamon, but they never responded to someone asking for their stance.
This list contains pretty much the ONLY DE/WM projects that explicitly refuse AI. It’s a very small list.
For those of us trying to avoid AI slop and copyright asbestos nightmares, the situation is dire.
You can still use the old window manager. Or just use X11. To my knowledge at least, XFCE is not going Wayland-exclusive.
I guess this list is handy
and maybe also this one? https://www.newinlinux.com/ai-free-linux-distros-open-source-operating-systems/
i3 wins again.
Unfortunately i3 accepts AI code as well: https://github.com/i3/i3/blob/next/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md
This list contains the only known WMs that reject AI code.
aw man…
From reading Nate Graham’s blog posts and how much he cares about software quality, I wouldn’t expect him to endorse or approve this. We can rest assured knowing that KDE won’t be infested with AI bloat
In a forum thread about AI policy, Nate essentially completely shot down the idea of KDE taking on an anti-AI policy. He appears to be pro-AI.
They just put up this ticket one day ago. It not only fully endorses AI contributions but also instructs developer to specifically hide their AI usage.
I read that as a poorly worded way of saying submissions should not be obviously AI made. However this response from Niccolo really does solidify that they want absolutely no requirement to disclose AI code to avoid “shaming” the developer, and to give no consideration for environmental concerns.
That is in direct opposition to the advice from FSFE that recommends cataloging all AI submissions in case of future legal dispute due to AI code not bring able to be licensed as GPL, and for the AI generating plagiarized copyrighted code.
This tragically shows that KDE as an organization are not willing to divert from complete acceptance of AI-slop.
Niccolo is an enlightened centrist I wouldn’t expect anything better from him. Need any more evidence, scroll down two posts.
Calling someone a “centrist” because he doesn’t want political enemies to be murdered is the dumbest purity test type shit.
If an author had an obviously centrist character say that line I’d call it lazy and on the nose writing.
I think it could be pretty easily argued he is a centrist because he “Doesn’t think Charlie Kirk supported Hitler’s policies”, when Kirk clearly did.
So you’re calling someone “centrist” because of one take, when he is even open to having his mind changed?
I also don’t think Kirk was “supporting Hitler policies”, though I’m open to having my mind changed on that if you have specific examples.
