Talk of AI in KDE sets the community ablaze

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.