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Ubuntu AI Operating Systems Software

Ubuntu's AI Plans Have Linux Users Looking For a 'Kill Switch' (theverge.com) 100

Posted by BeauHD from the year-of-the-AI-linux-desktop dept.
Canonical's plan to add AI features to Ubuntu has sparked pushback from users who are concerned it could follow Windows 11's AI-heavy direction. "After Canonical's announcement earlier this week that it's bringing AI features to Ubuntu, replies included requests for an AI 'kill switch' or a way to disable the upcoming features," reports The Verge. Canonical says it has no plans for a "global AI kill switch" but it will allow users to remove any AI features they don't want. From the report: In his original post, [Canonical's VP of engineering, Jon Seager] said the upcoming AI features will include accessibility tools like AI speech-to-text and text-to-speech, along with agentic AI features for tasks like troubleshooting and automation. Canonical is also encouraging its engineers to use AI more and plans to begin introducing AI features in Ubuntu "throughout the next year."

In a follow-up comment, Seager clarified that, "my plan is to introduce AI-backed features as a 'preview' on a strictly opt-in basis in [Ubuntu version] 26.10. In subsequent releases, my plan is to have a step in the initial setup wizard that allows the user to choose whether or not they'd like the AI-native features enabled." Ultimately, he said, "All of these capabilities will be delivered as Snaps to the OS, layered on top of the existing Ubuntu stack. That means there will always be the option of removing those Snaps." Users who prefer to avoid AI entirely could switch to other distros like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, or Zorin OS. "These distros have some similarities to Ubuntu, but may not necessarily adopt the new AI features Canonical is rolling out," adds The Verge.

Ubuntu's AI Plans Have Linux Users Looking For a 'Kill Switch' More | Reply

Ubuntu's AI Plans Have Linux Users Looking For a 'Kill Switch'

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  • easy solution (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:06PM (#66119164)
    Don't use freaking Ubuntu. The debacle with the Gnu coreutils replacement -- shipping an LTS version with broken replacements -- should have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Debian is fine now, just use Debian.

    • I do use Debian, but it's still a fact that its versions of a lot of software are very, very old. Like, multiple major versions old. There's very good reasons to not want to run it.

      I was running Pop!OS for a while and I was pretty happy with it. I switched to Debian in a vain attempt to get support from Steam, but as it turns out, they just do not provide support to Linux users when their client is failing. They came up with another shitty excuse for why they couldn't help me after I switched to Debian (whi

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        versions of a lot of software are very, very old. Like, multiple major versions old. There's very good reasons to not want to run it.

        "Old" isn't necessarily bad. What's an example of a practical problem with this?

        • Can't make kde drag and drop behavior sane

        • Can't download the latest security updates, because *Nix is only secure with the latest updates!

      • yes but also no (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Debian releases every two years, and they have a sane release cycle which freezes software versions some months before release. So the latest version of Debian is 13 aka "Trixie," and it includes GCC version 14.2. GCC 15 was released in April 2025, and Trixie was released in August 2025. So right now it's one major release behind. When GCC 16 is released in a few months, at that point Debian will be two major versions of gcc behind. And it's possible that in 2026 a third version of gcc will be released befo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          Perhaps you need to run the 'testing' release, currently forky. That gets you much more current software versions.

          • I wouldn't. I'm running Forky right now and it has some fairly major broken bits, and you have to install packages that haven't been made ready yet via sid, which has problems. It says something that so-called "unstable" is actually more stable than Forky right now.

            (And that's all fine BTW, not criticizing Debian here, just the advice to use it because it's more up to date.)

            In all honesty, I don't think the "But it's two versions behind!" thing is a big deal anyway. It's two versions behind solely because s

            • I used to use flatpak, but then it just spontaneously stopped allowing updates one day so I removed it rather than fight with it trying to fix it...

              • I'm not a fan of Flatpak, but...

                1. It's so much more reliable than Snap.
                2. It's so much less evil than Snap (the problems with Ubuntu removing applications like Firefox you installed from external repos and replacing them with broken Snap variants was the straw that broke the camel's back in my case and had me move to Debian)
                3. It does at least seem to provide a way for some application maintainers to provide certain types of application.

                I really wish the "custom repo" thing was more common, maybe with the

        • Debian releases every two years, and they have a sane release cycle which freezes software versions some months before release.

          So basically the same thing that Ubuntu's two-year "LTS" track does. Ubuntu 24.04 "noble" is feeling fairly old at the moment. Ubuntu 26.04 "resolute" was released a week ago to users on the semiannual "interim" track, and it'll be offered to LTS users come the first point release about three months from now. Drinkypoo has a point, however, that Debian has no direct counterpart to Ubuntu's interim track.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Generally, Debian has a good eye for what needs updates and what does not. And they also do patch-backporting for some things. If you are on "stable" it generally is fine.

      • A lot of important packages are available with backports from closer to the development branches that can be installed on the last stable version and will be updated as soon as considered moderately stable. Use backports when available if you need something more recent than the version shipped. They don't cover everything, but there are many backported packages.

  • I guess I stop using Ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:29PM (#66119212)

    One of the things I like about Linux is that it's common to follow a philosophy of "start with nothing then add what you need" rather than "throw in everything and good luck trying to remove anything problematic".

    Make it an optional component suggested during the installation procedure and it's fine. Force it on everyone and you're undermining good security and I have to suspect you're doing it for reasons I wouldn't like.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Wait... now? You are stopping to use Ubuntu now? Due to this announcement? You have a philosophy of having only what you need on the OS, and ... you were using Ubuntu prior to today? What is wrong with you.

      I think you're virtue signalling. You're either not actually using Ubuntu (since it was not remotely aligned with your philosophy prior to this announcement), or you have no intention of actually stopping to use it. Your post is nonsensical.

      • You have a philosophy of having only what you need on the OS

        He didn't say that. Before you reply to people with such surly condescension, you need to make sure you actually understand what they said.

        • He didn't say that. Before you reply to people with such surly condescension, you need to make sure you actually understand what they said.

          One of the things I like about Linux is that it's common to follow a philosophy of "start with nothing then add what you need"

          Back to English class with you moron.

          • Were you going for irony in that last sentence or are you truly that self-unaware? The quote states that Linux follows that philosophy, and that the user likes that fact about Linux. It does not say the user follows that philosophy, much less to whatever degree of strictness you're insisting they must.

    • Re:I guess I stop using Ubuntu (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @08:37PM (#66119456) Homepage Journal

      Personally, I like Ubuntu. Its been really stable, easy to use, does what I want.

      I like AI too. Is that going to get me roasted? I use it at work and it has gotten much better in the past year or so, so I use it a lot at work now. And I chat anonymously with Gemini because it can hold a philosophical conversation with me better than most people I know.

      I don't like being spied-on of course. So I will probably be disabling the various AI features that they are baking into the OS. I have no need for text/speech AI and I have no need for baked-in task automation or troubleshooting AI. When I discover a need for AI, I just reach out to the proper tool.

      But I am not going to quit using my favorite distro just because they are trying to keep up with the rest of the world. So long as it's easy for me to turn it off (no Microsoft-style dark patterns) and it stays off once I turn it off (again unlike Microsoft), I am fine with it.

      • Re:I guess I stop using Ubuntu (Score:4, Funny)

        by apparently ( 756613 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @10:56PM (#66119604)

        I chat anonymously with Gemini because it can hold a philosophical conversation with me better than most people I know.

        You should probably keep stuff like that to yourself.

        • Really? Consider:

          Me: Was Nietzsche antisemitic?

          Gemini: The question of Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship with antisemitism is a classic case of historical identity theft. The short answer is: No, Nietzsche was not an antisemite. In fact, he was frequently and vocally "anti-antisemitic."
          The confusion largely stems from two sources: the deliberate manipulation of his work by his sister after his death, and his aggressive critique of Judeo-Christian morality, which casual readers often mistake for ethn

          • That's a conversation about celebrities, not philosophy. By the way, the term "Judeo-Christian" is a huge red flag. Anything which is both Jewish and Christian will also be Islamic, so you'd call it something like "Abrahamic", anyone who uses it needs to be asked why they're marginalising Islam.

            • Interesting. A conversation about the beliefs and statements of a famous philosopher, and his reasons for them, doesn't qualify as a conversation about philosophy?

              I am sensing a distinction without a difference.

              Be that as it may, I don't have control over Gemini's training data so I have no say over how much representation Islam might have in it. That would be on Google.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        Is that going to get me roasted?

        likely!

        So I will probably be disabling the various AI features that they are baking into the OS.

        according to this communication, you won't have to: it's all opt in, which is the sane way to go about it. i don't need these features either, and i don't see myself letting "agents" doing stuff by themselves on my system anytime soon, but "ai" is very relevant tech today and it's good news that distros start considering support, as long as user choice and privacy are considered. otoh it is evolving so fast that i don't really see it as something that should be integrated at the os level yet. then a

    • One of the things I like about Linux is that it's common to follow a philosophy of "start with nothing then add what you need" rather than "throw in everything and good luck trying to remove anything problematic".

      So that's why you refused to use Ubuntu already, because of Unity and Snap, right?

  • The kill switch has a name. Thy name is 'Manjaro'.

  • Move on (Score:5, Informative)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:41PM (#66119244)

    >"Ubuntu has sparked pushback from users who are concerned"

    Mint: https://www.linuxmint.com/down... [linuxmint.com]
    Mint Debian: https://www.linuxmint.com/down... [linuxmint.com]
    Debian: https://www.debian.org/ [debian.org]

  • Where they can mine their users for training data. That training data is what makes AI work because it's really just a super duper fancy predictive search engine. So that training data is worth billions if not trillions.

    There isn't a single platform holder on planet Earth that isn't going to try to get their hands on that training data.

    Yeah this will probably backfire on Ubuntu but if it doesn't the owners are going to get filthy stinking rich. It's the kind of gamble that's worth it.

  • Hopefully not Xubuntu (Score:3)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:50PM (#66119268)

    I'm hoping Xubuntu doesn't also follow this track. I get that it's closely related, so I may be screwed but I'm still gonna "hope". More hopefulness is that if I just stick to LTS 24 and not move onto 26 or above, I should be fine for a while.

    Otherwise, yeah, I may have to migrate away. Luckily there are many options and I'm sure I can find another one that will let me use XFCE as opposed to KDE or Gnome.

    • >"I may have to migrate away. [...]I'm sure I can find another one that will let me use XFCE as opposed to KDE or Gnome."

      "Light, simple, efficient: Linux Mint Xfce Edition: Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment. It doesn't support as many features as Cinnamon but itâ(TM)s lighter on resource usage."

      https://www.linuxmint.com/down... [linuxmint.com]

      Mint also has the popular Cinnamon Edition and also the MATE Edition as well. But it doesn't matter which "edition" you download/install, since you can easily install

      • Nice. I remember doing that with Slackware quite a while back as well. At one point I even toyed with the build your own distro but who has the time for all that.

    • Is there such a thing as a Linux distro that doesn't let you choose your desktop environment? Anyhow I can recommend Debian.

  • So looks like AI is taking over everything, every platform, every product, every service, every job, it's a plague, a virus, a disease of some sort and apparently there is no cure, someone is always pushing it. Is it AI that is pushing AI?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They are definitely trying to create a "too big to fail" situation. But I do not think they will get there.

    • So looks like AI is taking over everything, every platform, every product, every service, every job, it's a plague, a virus, a disease of some sort and apparently there is no cure, someone is always pushing it. Is it AI that is pushing AI?

      The current form of AI is mostly acting as a nice, concise way of saying, "Give to me all your data, and we will give you quasi-hallucinated answers to questions you may or may not be asking." Of course it's being pushed. The algorithms must be fed. And the tech C-suites can make a *LOT* of money off of the data they are able to harvest through them. So, in a way, yes, AI is pushing AI. The algorithms demand more data, and the tech companies are happy to try to shoe-horn their way into every single computin

    • > Is it AI that is pushing AI?

      Nope, Roko's Basilisk remains a thought experiment because AGI is still a long way away if it ever will be a practical technology to begin with.

      AI is the logical end point of unrestrained capitalism, whose adherents devalue human work and will do anything to avoid paying people a living wage, even if the alternative is paying conmen a much larger amount of money for something that, ultimately, will fail far more often and produce lower quality results. AI isn't being shoved

      • Your emotional response to AI is understandable ... when it performs well it is terrifying. I've done lots of complex chatting with GOOG.ai ... from QM to early Church history ... performance runs well above expectations. Yet after such use I see AI as a "talking" encyclopedia , very like the Britannica volumes parents bought me for my 10-th birthday. Usefulness of AI has nothing to do with capitalist/fascist/collectivist/religious ... anything. In my experience AI-platforms pr
  • I am grateful to Ubuntu for having been the instrument (and catalyst) for my switching to Linux approx. 10 years ago. LLMs on the other hand are ultimately based on the Newtonian function [wikipedia.org] (and more generally the Universal approximation function [wikipedia.org]), checking against human data. The devs are supposed to know better. I never though that any Linux distro would have chased after and jumped on the LLM hype train, but (of course, in retrospect) here we are. (Time to switch)

    • Re:Ubuntu is slowly becoming MS Win (Score:5, Informative)

      by machineghost ( 622031 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @07:22PM (#66119348)

      Slowly becoming? They've been this way for more than a decade: remember the whole Unity debacle?

      Way back in 2010, LInux had two (major) UIs: KDE and GNOME. Canonical (specifically, Mark Shuttleworth) tried to force everyone to adopt a brand new system, Unity, despite the fact that no one asked for it. It was a straight up Bill Gates "We have the most market share, we can do whatever the fuck we want" power play.

      It didn't work: the larger Linux community revolted. But it took Shuttleworth SEVEN YEARS to give up and finally appreciate that he wasn't a god who got to dictate what the Linux community ... and clearly he never really learned that lesson.

      • I remember, and agree. To me, way back when, it just looked like growing pains. Obviously, I was wrong.

      • You act like he didn't win. Unity circa 2010 and GNOME circa now are surprisingly similar. If you used Ubuntu a year before Unity was developed, using the classic GNOME 2 UI, then used Unity when it came out, then fell into a coma, and woke up last week, you could be forgiven for thinking that GNOME 67 (or whatever version they're up to now) was built upon Unity instead of GNOME 2. Unity influenced the design of GNOME far more than anything else, and it's almost certainly all due to pressure from Canonical

      • Canonical (specifically, Mark Shuttleworth) tried to force everyone to adopt a brand new system, Unity, despite the fact that no one asked for it.

        Tell us you don't know how Open Source works without telling us. Canonical wasn't trying to force anyone to adopt anything. It differentiated its product from others. THAT IS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF DISTRIBUTIONS. You don't like it, just go use something else. People didn't like it, they forked it and produced Ubuntu derivatives without it.

        Seriously you're complaining about one of Linux's and the Open Source Software movement in general's greatest features. People trying different things is a good thing.

  • The kill switch is called Debian (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @07:15PM (#66119328) Homepage

    Debian is the answer. While a decade or so ago, Ubuntu was easier to install and more polished, Debian has pretty much caught up in terms of polish.

  • AI speech to text and text to speech would be a great addition for the accessibility subsystem. The current screen reader software voice sucks really, really bad. AI speech would be a great improvement. But that's the only place I can imagine where AI would be a benefit. Scratch that. If AI could do great handwriting recognition, that would also be a great boon.

  • All of these capabilities will be delivered as Snaps to the OS, layered on top of the existing Ubuntu stack. That means there will always be the option of removing those Snaps.

    It sounds as though it will be pretty easy for Mint to leave out the AI stuff. And they're already well used to taking the Snaps out of upstream Ubuntu and substituting packages.

    But at some point it may be the case that stripping the Snapification from Ubuntu might be too onerous a task. Sometime in the next couple of years, LMDE may be the only edition of Mint available. So far I've been too lazy to install LMDE and start evaluating / getting used to it. I guess it's time to get up off my ass and see if it

  • Are these cloud features? (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @07:42PM (#66119378)

    Or features that run natively? who cares if it runs natively, if this can't canonical trying to get it hooks and your PC then yeah reject it.

    • FTA "AI features will be landing in Ubuntu throughout the next year as we feel that they’re of sufficient maturity and quality, with a bias toward local inference by default." Then the article talks about local inference a bunch, take that as you will.

      • That is what I would like to see is inference on the edge especially with an OS so you can interact and not have someone know your every move.

    • It is usually both. Say you have a spy speaker that listens for a magic word and then expects a question from you that it should answer. The listening for the magic word is done on the device itself, as it is a simple task and would need an insane amount of bandwidth and resources to do that in the cloud. The question itself is then processed in the cloud. Turning that answer into audio again may or may not be done on the device itself.

      • You can run moonshine natively on a PC and it does a decent job, so you can run some of these models on the edge. They are starting to build in AI accelerators into PC's that are not as powerful as cloud services, they should use those if possible and not send things to the cloud.

  • The moment I need to tell Ubuntu's AI to stay out of my stuff I'm gone.
    Been a solid run with Ubuntu LTS versions but there are other options available.

  • Torvalds... Why would it not work well for other Linux users?

    • Nobody is arguing that AI shouldn't be usable on Linux. The argument is about what kind of choice the users are given.

      • I know that, you know that, we both know that. But a cursory read of the other comments shows that most people in these parts did not get the memo, an pretend that every single people using linux get a no-ai experience, and has the l337 skillzzz to install huggingface and do the model integration on all the relevant parts of the OS themselves....

        I fail to see how accountants, administrators, video editors, photographers and biologists, just to name a few, will acomplish that.

        But then again, what does an Ope

  • My editor keeps asking me to tell me more about these features..

  • I havenâ(TM)t swapped distros in a long time. Whats it like? Any useful utilities for making the transition not awful, or do we still just make backups and restore?

  • Follow the money (Score:3)

    by CommunityMember ( 6662188 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @11:00PM (#66119608)
    Canonical is chasing the money, and the enterprises (that actually pay for maintenance, and support Canonical engineering through those subscriptions) mostly want AI to be part of their deployed solution. If you want a company not chasing the money, Canonical may not be the distro for you.

    • Nobody is saying that AI should not be on Ubuntu - they just want the ability to easily not have it. Ie have the choice - which is what Linux systems are famous for.

  • Is this AI that will run locally on your own hardware (like llama-ccp and so on) or is it a way to sell you time on someone else's AI?

  • I don't need a kill switch. (Score:3)

    by aergern ( 127031 ) on Thursday April 30, 2026 @12:50AM (#66119696)
    I'll stick with Arch and it's derivatives. /shrug

  • Something is seriously wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Thursday April 30, 2026 @01:13AM (#66119720)

    with the current generation of young programmers. They clearly do not know the difference between an operating system and applications. Nobody should be trying to add AI to Windows, or to Linux, or to any other OS. The OS is supposed to add a layer of abstraction to the platform, so applications can be written and then run on multiple systems with hardware differences. The OS is supposed to allocate resources to applications. The modern OS is supposed to allow multiple applications to run at the same time or appear to run at the same time using some combination of cores and time-slicing. If any operating system is having problems doing these things (the basics) then programmers should be improving whichever element is not up to par.

    So-called AI, as currently being hyped, is a mutant derivative of large language models and could well be a computing fad. Fads do not belong in an OS; they BARELY belong in an app. We know things like memory management, bulk storage management, and process management belong in an OS and we have decades of experience confirming that, but AI a decade from now could be nothing like AI today.

    There's plenty of need for coders in Linux land to get the basics of the OS right. For example: as long as I cannot get proper support in linux for half of my printers (in other words: the hardware abstraction is still incomplete), there's ZERO excuse for any linux programmers spending time adding AI fluffery. Similarly, the OS is still using a web interface and CUPS for printers, in part because the OS lacked its own standardized API and abstraction for printers. I'm not even fully convinced that the whole Xorg vs Wayland thing, and the init vs systemd thing, are fully settled.

    To be a little more charitable: it's possible this is not entirely about younger coders wanting to play with the current new shiny object and being bored by completing/fixing/maintaining the basics - the investor types are currently pushing AI as an investment and thus anybody wanting money is sprinkling AI about and talking it up to attract attention, but even there, it's the job of serious programmers to stand up to people doing that and say "NO, that's NOT appropriate for inclusion into an operating system."

    • They clearly do not know the difference between an operating system and applications.

      One of the biggest benefits of the modern software is integration. We have an over-arching piece of software that already does this, the Operating System. Literally things that need to access across applications in an agnostic way needs to be incorporated in an operating system, or an application suite. AI is a great example of this (while I'm a non-believer in its future), it's usefulness is dictated by its ability to traverse applications at an OS level. You can't do that as an independent app.

      That doesn'

    • Linux distributions are supposed to contain both operating system and applications though.

  • Remember Canonical solely exists because Debian was not new-user friendly.
    Things are different now.

    Other distros thrive where Canonical has no interest as Canonical thrives where Debian took no interest.
    Specialization is easy with Linux.

  • Snap (Score:2)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    Oh, good, they're only snaps.

    Because snaps are shite and I turned them off.

    Brand-new, fresh, Framework, highly-Linux-supported laptop, clean install of Ubuntu on it, over Christmas.

    I'm willing to try almost anything... so I went with the defaults.

    And within the first week I found myself uninstalling every snap package and replacing it with a traditional apt one.

    Steam snap - simply doesn't work. It makes it look like Steam is shite, in fact, and it loads but NONE of the games work properly. Uninstalled the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      I can confirm you issues with the steam snap, Igad to uninstall it and go with the apt one as the snap broke game capture in obs. But that said ather rhan that I hsve had 0 issues with ogher snaps, plz note I was lucky enough to grab 64GB of ram before the prices went vertical so the repoted ram increses from using snaps haven't really stung me,so my experience might not be typically

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        RAM isn't the issue.

        But some software is trapped forever in old, outdated (and insecure) versions and never gets updated.

        Some software is trapped in a "bottle" and you can't explore the filesystem (e.g. you can't save your downloads / other files created in it anywhere sensible without tweaking a load of things).

        And some software just plain doesn't work but it's still on the store.

        If I were to introduce a newbie to Linux, they would be led to use snap, and so much would be incredibly frustrating / out of da

    • And this is someone who had the patience to run Slackware 3.9 as a primary desktop

      Yeah, but those two things are diametrically opposed. Slackware 2 was my first Linux. It didn't do anything stupid.

  • The option should be off by default, the experience should not be degraded by being off and the models that the AI feature points at should be "open" insofar as possible and be accessible on or offline. i.e. I can download the model and run it locally if I wish.

    Open source really needs a licence akin to GPL for models and their training data to share and share alike. There is an opportunity also here for sites, authors, artists etc. to tag content to invite and consent to using their data for training ope

  • This is an OS for developers. Everything is a la carte. Bundled features that no one asked for is the domain of Microsoft and Apple.

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