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LINUX Unplugged · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
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…
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…
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