KDE tried to open a discussion about a policy for AI-assisted contributions and it turned into a fight about banning them outright, as GNOME has done. Fisher's position through the segment is that maintainers should judge a patch by its quality rather than by how it was written, and that a ban hands the agentic-desktop niche to newer projects — he points to one that he says raised more in three months than KDE, GNOME or Mint ever have.
That you can't have people and
forestalls the future of trying to do that.
And I just, again, I want to underscore, like, if you're anti-Linux desktop growth, then what are we trying to do here with free software? And what was the whole purpose of making something that was making the information free to the world? Like, what are we trying to accomplish here? Are we just trying to create a clubhouse that's just big enough for us to hang out in that we can pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist? And I think what we have, and I'll end on this, is we have a lot of people out there that have made this their hobby for the last 20 years. And this is what they've got. They don't have something. They don't have another skill set. They don't really have much else. And they've devoted their lives to maintaining some of these projects. It's their hobby. It has become, for some of them, their job. It is also for some of them, it's what ails them because they are so dedicated. And when something comes along, like the change we saw in digital photography of that kind of scale that tells them your hobby is changing and there's new people coming in that don't take your hobby as seriously as you do or approach your hobby the way you do we have this group of people that are I mean they're they're almost it's almost a mass formation of psychosis that's happening and then they're being supported and tricked by rich tech CEOs that are convincing them that their products are so powerful they're going to take us all out in four to 10 years and it just sort of plays into this sort of chamber that it just sort of gets a doom loop it's a doom loop and they're and they're being manipulated by the very people that they claim to be against but yet they're like they're being influenced by them and uh and so we don't get to the practical conversation of how do we safely integrate this in a way that actually meets our values and lets people come over to Linux and get right to work
and see that they can they can affect change in this software that it's responsive to them that it can meet their needs
I mean okay okay all right the reason why 20 million dollars matters is I invite the listener to go out there and add up all the money that Linux Mint has ever raised or that the GNOME desktop has ever raised or that the Plasma and KDE team has ever raised and then ask yourself why they have raised that more money than they ever have in three months there's a real interest a market interest in a agentic capable operating system and I don't know what makes Oma Archie agentic they you know they build in some tools by default and they have some skills that make it so the tools that they build in by default know how to manage the operating system I mean I think that's that's just really and if so we don't have like there aren't people thinking about how to isolate D bus to make it private and there's like that's not happening and they're sucking up market share and I think about these projects like KDE that have been around for 30 years and they have a hole in the boat and they don't they're not they're not able to plug the hole or perhaps even grow because their community can't get past an argument that isn't really valid anymore and the problems we need to solve are how to handle all of these contributions and how to make these workflows work on the plasma desktop that isn't going to expose people's information and we're not there we're just not there yet and the commercial desktops and projects like oma archie are just going to lap them and they're going to continue to lose users to that stuff so that's the latest on the ai debate but we do have good news that i'd like to cover including perhaps although it's not committed as such yet but perhaps a replacement to the breeze theme oh yeah so there could be i know there could be some big changes coming to the plasma desktop
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