Kiriko

joined 1 week ago
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55
KDE bans user calling out racism, antisemitism and misogyny but not the perpetrator. (awful.systems)
submitted 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by Kiriko@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
20 comments fedilink
 

During the AI policy discussion on https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/work_items/187 someone called a KDE contributor out for their bigotry. KDE banned the person calling them out and removed all the comments.

https://archive.ph/6YccJ#note_1648724 (no other archive available)

https://invent.kde.org/sweetluna (blocked user)

https://invent.kde.org/svin

I guess it's official. Fascism is allowed. Calling it out is not.

37
"Proposed KDE LLM guidelines" is now officially locked (invent.kde.org)
 

Some of the worst LLM takes I've seen in a while. I've never thought FLOSS would be taken over by proprietary torment nexuses so fast.

The discussion will probably continue behind closed doors, so the public has no way of knowing who says what and corporations have their way easier.

And someone got exposed for being a Nazi.

Proposed KDE LLM guidelines in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] Kiriko@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That whole thread right now is awful. Just awful.

It looks like only 2-3 KDE devs pushback and the rest are thumbs-uping pro-AI points. Claims that LLMs are fine for the environment... Then someone got exposed for racism and misogyny among many other -isms and they claim that some of the participants in that discussion LIKE those posts... YIKES. It all makes sense why they are dying on the framework hill.

Proposed KDE LLM guidelines in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] Kiriko@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Noctalia used to have a handful of claude commits, they seem to have been force pushed out or similar. Hopefully out of change in mind.

Proposed KDE LLM guidelines in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] Kiriko@awful.systems 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (9 children)

Always fence-sitting, I'm so tired of the current KDE leadership, I'm genuinely stopping my donations now.

"Hey KDE, Framework supports Nazis, can you not collaborate with them?"

Nope sorry, we need the money for our AI experiments, we will put their logo on all our pages now and will beg them to pre-install us on their overpriced laptops. We love our LGBT community though, we made the latest mascot trans! Please forget that we accept money from people that want you dead!

Slimbook, donates to or supports Omarchy, and still has ads on kde.org https://slimbook.com/en/blog/guides-2/post/introduction-to-omarchy-484

Framework wants to preinstall Fedora KDE and KDE and Fedora leaders are super excited about it:

“It's really exciting to see this device become the first Framework device to ship with KDE and Plasma software. We have put a lot of effort into making sure our software is fun to use with touch and pen input.” - Aleix Pol, President of KDE e.V.

https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-12-now-with-core-series-3

There's just no backbone, everything's about money money money and money. All it will take is an Anthropic or OpenAI sponsorship for whatever mild AI guidelines to get repealed.

What's the alternative anymore? Cosmic is made by a hardware company, I have 0 trust in that. All it'll take is a loss in profits for it to be abandoned. XFCE is full in on AI. LXQT is okay with AI contributions. Cinnamon moves way too slowly and has no opinion on AI. Gnome told Framework to kick rocks and has some strict anti-AI policies in some places but if I wanted a worse MacOS, I'd use MacOS. All the window managers are too barebones and the GUIs on top are all vibecoded. DankMaterialShell? Vibecoded. Noctalia? Vibecoded. Hyprland is naziware. Quickshell? vibecoded. Qt itself has AI assistants in its IDE.

So really what's the alternative? Windows and Mac are also vibecoded. Firefox and Chrome are also vibecoded. Even programming languages and compilers are being vibecoded.

What would it take? A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] Kiriko@awful.systems 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I haven't been up to date with all of them, forgive me if anything is outdated, though from what I remember seeing:

What would it take? A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] Kiriko@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago

Unfortunately it's not a single instance. There was a thread on their forums I had notifications on for. It was about banning AI.

It ended up locked. Someone posted some links to slop code in KDE, I thought it got locked because they made up their minds, turns out they jumped off the fence towards AI... https://discuss.kde.org/t/sorry-to-bring-up-a-contentious-topic-kde-ai-llm-policy/46333/164

25
What would it take? A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE (conf.kde.org)
 

I was very excited about this year's Akademy (KDE's anual conference), until I saw this... Linux desktops won't save us.

A talk in three parts, building towards a vision for a sovereign desktop in 2026 (and a look back).

Loved. In 2003, together with Eva Brucherseifer, Jan's company relevantive ran the first large-scale usability study of the Linux desktop on behalf of decision-makers considering migration. KDE 3.1 on SuSE was tested by 60 office workers with no prior Linux experience; 87% enjoyed working with it, 80% estimated they could reach professional competence within a week. The Linux desktop wasn't a usability disaster — but realising its potential required deliberate configuration, honest naming, and treating migration as a human-resources problem, not a technical one. The findings shaped a decade of OpenUsability work inside KDE. They are, awkwardly, almost entirely still applicable. We'll look at what stuck, what didn't, and why "lovable" — not merely "usable" — is the bar today, and why getting it right cuts the cost and risk of every migration discussion that follows.

AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity. Plasma is uniquely well-fit for this — Activities, Plasmoids, the existing scripting surface — but a handful of upstream changes (declarative reconciliation, per-widget capabilities, richer Activity metadata) would turn KDE into the first shell that treats AI as infrastructure rather than as a chat box bolted to the side.

Sovereign. Once a user owns their model and their tools, the same question returns at institutional scale. EU institutions, member countries, and a long tail of organisations are openly asking what a credible, non-colonialising desktop stack looks like. No project carries this alone — a sovereign desktop is an ecosystem question. KDE is uniquely positioned as the shell, the integration layer, the experience; but filesharing belongs with Nextcloud, the browser with Firefox, the office suite with .... The last third of the talk is about what KDE's partnership surface could look like — outward, to industry and public administration, and sideways, to the allied open-source projects that already do the rest of the work better than anyone could redo it. Who owns that surface, where it lives, what KDE e.V. would need, what not to build. Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation: the user not owned by a vendor, the institution not owned by a foreign supplier — and the stack not owned by anyone, because the right partners hold the right pieces.

This talk is an invitation — from peple with a long arc inside this community — to take a serious swing at the question the 2003 study posed and never quite resolved: what would it take for KDE to be the desktop people actively choose, not just the one some of us settle for? Attendees will leave with: a concrete proposal (KaDAi) to react to or tear apart, a clear set of asks the project could direct at Plasma maintainers, and the framing for a sovereignty conversation that KDE is uniquely positioned to lead.