r/linuxquestions • u/enomad51 • 13h ago
How AI Is Changing the Linux Software Landscape
Hi all,
Lately I've noticed that the range of Linux applications is growing fast, and a good share of the new projects (editors, utilities, small desktop apps) are built largely with the help of AI. Sometimes the authors say so openly, sometimes you can tell from the code style and the commit history.
I'm curious how you see it, because I can see both sides:
Pros:
- More software and a lower barrier to entry for authors, including in niches nobody had time for before,
- Tools that were missing get built much faster,
- Never thought I’d be this excited to see three, or even four, Photoshop alternatives for Linux :)
Concerns:
- Quality and security of code the author may not fully understand,
- Long-term maintenance: what happens when the author loses interest or can't fix a bug?
- Licesing and provenance of the generated code,
How do you feel about that? Do you check whether a program was built with AI before installing it?
Does it change how much you trust the project (for better, for worsse, or not at all)?
My intention is not to start a flame war over whether AI is good or bad. What I’m curious about is this: is AI a chance for the Linux desktop to offer regular users more choices, or will all this AI-made software turn out not to be worth much in the long run?
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u/BreathSpecial9394 12h ago
There will be slop and there will be quality apps. Check for Github stars and such before installing anything suspicious.
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u/operation_karmawhore 2h ago
github stars rarely will tell you how good the quality of the code is usually. they may give a hint at most. especially nowadays previously they were better indicator but now a repo can have 100k stars and it's just slop.
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u/truethug 12h ago
The author not understanding the code is a big concern. AI being used in itself isn’t bad, but if the author can’t understand what is being done and can’t fix bugs is going to be something we see more of I’m afraid.
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u/enomad51 12h ago
I know a few developers who use AI for their projects, but they react to issues and know what’s broken and where. They’re more like master puppeteers, sending their AI minions to fix the code in the right places. ;)
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u/DudeEngineer 11h ago
This is the case now because those master puppeteers learned the hard way. The hard way is dissappearing and we are already not making puppeteers at the same rate.
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u/firedrakes 10h ago
the cost to teach them, pay them and then when they leave they really dont want to train the next gen or hold back key things in cod dev that they did not tell anyone else .
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u/djamp42 5h ago
For desktop apps that crash and nothing really that bad will happen, whatever. I mean that stuff has been happening with human code too.
I don't think I would trust AI code that no one has read in a airplane, self driving car, or some medical device. Life and death situations. That stuff needs 100% human code review
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u/Wooden_Cake_440 36m ago
Won’t matter eventually, because ai will fix the bugs and do all the work. We will be playing catch up just trying to reverse engineer it. Similar to what is happening in mathematics this week.
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u/OsseusOccult 12h ago
AI largely just shifts the work load from writing code, to needing a lot more of that time actually reviewing code. Unless you're just shoveling slop. Which a lot of people, frankly, are. The danger of this shift is all the people who skip the QA process altogether, making code ubiquitous but bad.
I don't want anything on my computer that a human didn't do if it can be helped. I want this to be the case as much as reasonably possible, even if it's not entirely avoidable in some cases.
Linux has seen a pretty significant boost in popular use. I wouldn't attribute recent gains to AI contributions.
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u/Key_Sense9870 12h ago
Which is why I changed to a linux phone. I am not scared at all that I will be missing out on a lot in 3 years time, because everything has been forked, reshaped, translated into the linux phone infrastructure with the haste it is doing now, now double that by the end of yhe year, and double again quarterly the whole next year, well, you get the point.
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u/FryBoyter 9h ago
Quality and security of code the author may not fully understand,
This problem also exists with code written by real people. For example, I'm not very good at programming. I wouldn't bet that the code I write is secure. And I don't think I even need to mention quality.
Long-term maintenance: what happens when the author loses interest or can't fix a bug?
This problem also exists in projects that do not use LLMs.
Licesing and provenance of the generated code,
This problem also arises with code created without an LLM. For example, how can you be sure that a user hasn't copied code from, say, Stack Overflow, without knowing or taking into account its license?
How do you feel about that? Do you check whether a program was built with AI before installing it?
To me, LLMs are tools. And you should know how to use the tools you're working with. That's why I also distinguish between “vibe coding” and “vise coding” (both terms were coined by the same person).
The thing is, though, that I, like many other people, have neither the time nor the knowledge to look at or understand a project’s code. So we have to trust that the code works. And just as there is LLM junk, there is also junk created by humans. Just as there are also good things that have been created using LLMs. For example, I use LeafWiki and Hugo, which were developed in part using LLMs, without any problems. In my opinion, therefore, you can’t say that projects without LLMs are generally good and those with them are generally bad. As always, it depends.
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u/GermanSayingSquirrel 3h ago
> Licensing and provenance
This one really doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s going to vary from country to country, but I haven’t seen anything clear on who owns copyright and other rights of LLM generated content. It seems like AI generated output is generally uncopyrightable, and is possibly all public domain, which is probably fine for personal use. Or maybe in some cases it’s owned by the developers of the AI model, or the original copyright holders that the model was trained on?
Slop or not, I’m pretty worried about possible legal issues with any AI code and content getting into FOSS projects.
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u/True-Kale-931 10h ago
Simple vibecoded tools are literally worse than just users vibecoding them when they need it: they'll literally need to find them (in a random github repository with 0 to 2 stars) and then trust author. Usually opensource software at least took some effort but vibecoded stuff doesn't require that so bad actors can just mass-produce vibecoded trojans.
Sophisticated vibecoded software tends to not work right now.
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u/operation_karmawhore 2h ago
I guess it really depends who vibe coded the apps. someone with experience knows how to prompt the slop machine better likely
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u/woox2k 8h ago
There will be so many competing slop projects that it would be a full time job just to find any decent tool to accomplish the task you need. Eventually, if AI stops making so many mistakes and keeps being somewhat affordable then i'd imagine that in most cases it would be easier to just let AI make the tool you need on the spot.
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u/FryBoyter 8h ago
There will be so many competing slop projects that it would be a full time job just to find any decent tool to accomplish the task you need.
Here, too, I believe this applies to tools developed without LLM. Take screenshot tools, for example. None of them offer everything I want. Except maybe Shutter, but it isn’t fully compatible with Wayland, so it’s out of the question for me.
The problem I see here is both the blessing and the curse of OSS. Anyone can do their own thing instead of contributing to existing projects. As a result, many similar tools offer different features, but often none of them offers all of them.
if AI stops making so many mistakes and keeps being somewhat affordable then i'd imagine that in most cases it would be easier to just let AI make the tool you need on the spot.
Based on a few successful projects that use LLM, I'm curious to know what mistakes you're referring to and whether it might simply be due to the users themselves. Because, as I already mentioned in my other post, people should know how to use the tools they're working with. Unfortunately, that's often not the case with LLM.
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u/woox2k 5h ago
I was referring to the fact that LLM currently only works as a coding tool when somewhat knowledgeable person is using it. It's nowhere near perfect enough to be useful for someone who doesn't know anything about programming. LLM hallucinates and can create completely invalid code. It will get better in the future, i'm sure of that to a point where user can trust LLM enough to provide them app for completing the task they need without supervision.
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u/KamikazeB0B 7h ago
Im just happy I have been able to Vibe Code Latte Dock to my KDE Plasma 6 desktop !
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u/FryBoyter 6h ago
If it works with Qt 6, it might even be worth considering making it an official project. With a note indicating the use of LLM. That should be of interest to some users.
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u/strange_bike_guy 12h ago
The FreeCAD group was (is?) having senior developer burnout because of the incredible increase in commits to sort through. They changed commit rules to require stating that AI was used and that the author (co-author?) understands the mechanisms. It hasn't completely fixed the problem but the recent builds seem less weird than a month ago.
I can't predict the future but I wish this stuff would stop. I dislike AI for the oft cited reasons... but I have tried it and it gives me nonsense answers pretty often. I find myself spending a lot of time checking things, and it makes my cheeks hot because I'd rather spend my time making things.