Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that “some people think AI is problematic” or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. I get that AI has many problems but at the same time the potential it has is immense, especially as an assistant on personal computers (just look at what “Apple Intelligence” seems to be capable of.) Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don’t become obsolete. Using an AI-less desktop may be akin to hand copying books after the printing press revolution. If you think of specific problems it is better to point them out and try think of solutions, not reject the technology as a whole.
TLDR: A lot of ludite sentiments around AI in Linux community.
On device Foss models to help you with various tasks.
Thankfully I really really don’t need an “AI” to use my desktop. I don’t want that kind of BS bloat either. But go ahead and install whatever you want on your machine.
It is quite a bloat. Llama3 7B is 4.7GB by itself, not counting all the dependencies and drivers. This can easily take 10+ GB of the drive. My Ollama setup takes about 30GB already. Given a single application (except games like COD that takes up 300GB), this is huge, almost the size of a clean OS install.
