A proposal to make KDE an “AI-native” desktop has gone down like a house on fire: screams, flames, people running for safety. There may be no survivors.*

Last weekend was KDE’s annual Akademy conference and it included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE. We noted that it seemed likely to polarize the audience. It looks like this was a considerable understatement.

In the days since, a debate over proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions descended into bans and a deleted thread. An outside campaign called for KDE to prohibit AI altogether, a GNOME developer proposed a similar policy for that project, and KDE developer Nate Graham apologized for his role in the uproar.

The Akademy talk was titled “A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” and the slide deck [PDF] is now available. It ends by saying: “The question is not whether AI. It is how. You choose how much AI – and which.”

It seems almost calculated to provoke an argument rather than invite discussion. We do not know if the authors intended this – we attempted to contact both of them, but they have not yet responded.

Graham opened a discussion on Invent, KDE’s GitLab instance, about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions. Although we are not a member, we watched this with some interest over the weekend. It rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventually removed the thread.

There is an archive of the discussion, but we warn you, it contains some highly offensive language, albeit censored by the member who quoted another member’s tweets on X. As events unfolded, the participant who drew attention to the posts was banned first. The author of the offensive material was banned later after their identity was verified.

The discussion is gone, but the argument continues.

One response was an outside initiative called KDE for People, which called on the KDE project to adopt a No-AI policy. Around 250 people signed it before its organizers closed it to further signatures.

GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has also published The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want, proposing that LLMs be barred from creating or modifying anything submitted to GNOME or hosted on its infrastructure.

This mentions the recent ballot on AI usage in Debian. We reported on the developer referendum about a month ago, noting that the broad spread of anti-AI options in the ballot was likely to split the vote. (This likelihood was dismissed in the comments.) Well, as The Register’s Asia-Pacific desk reported a few days later, Debian did not ban AI contributions.

Graham subsequently explained his involvement in a post titled KDE and AI, and you, and me. He opens by saying: “So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that.”

He notes that the Akademy talk met “what I’m told was a fairly chilly reception” and that “the next day, a workshop was held about the topic, also receiving a chilly reception.”

Every couple of years, the KDE project sets three goals for the next two years. Earlier this week, after Akademy, it chose its latest three: you can see them in the last column of the goal-setting Kanban board. The ones chosen are:

KDE for Enterprise and Deployments (Issue #5)

Better documentation (Issue #2)

Next Generation Styling for KDE (Issue #3)

We see no mention of AI in there. In context, that may come as a relief to parts of the community.

Bootnote

*A tip of the black Borsalino to the late great Terry Pratchett, for two different “house on fire” references we combined. ®