Please leave any AI feature out of all Ubuntu flavours and let the
community & Ubuntu users choose what to install or not at setup level
instead of forcing AI by default.
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Where is AI being forced by default?
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Have you seen the opening talk at the recent Ubuntu Summit 26.04? You are too late. Decisions have already been taken. Ubuntu is being put at the forefront of the conversation about AI.
Ubuntu will be the place where developers can work with AI safely.
I would be surprised if AI were to be forced on us. It’s being made compatible and available, not forced.
If I’m wrong, please supply your source so that I can learn.
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It has already been explained that they will be installed as Snaps, and as such, they can be removed with just two clicks (or a terminal command). Snaps themselves can be easily deleted if you don’t like them. Don’t worry about this issue. There are certain AI use cases that can make life much easier for some users, and they will also appreciate Canonical providing a good out-of-the-box experience; after all, the alternative—installing something that doesn’t come by default—tends to be more difficult.
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It is my sincerest hope that, as per the OP, the option for those snaps to be installed is an install-time prompting, for each separate AI system, and that unless the response is a “yes|install”, that every one of those will respect the wish of the installer and NOT be installed.
If it is the installer’s preference to forego any such AI capabilities, there should never be a requirement for a post-install purge of undesired AI bundles,
As a concession to those installers that do want AI, I concede that the first question encountered at install should be of the form,
- Do you wish to install all integrated AI capabilities? [y|N]
and a “yes” would bypass the prompting of a per-facility/service approval for AI tool installation.
As mentionned by @yasirel, there could be interdependancies where installations need to be “more closely managed”. Therefore, the per AI package prompting should be, not alphabetical, but rather in a logical less dependant to more dependant sequencing such that those interdependencies would be correctly accounted for in the various install scripts (presumably YAML) to ensure the proper integration and “peer awareness” of all the installed AI modules/services.
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I understood from the original thread about AI that it’s always opt in/out thing, because AI models in use are downloaded (because they are local ones) if user wants to use them.
I do not think that Ubuntu Workshop will be part of a default installation. Workshop is Canonical’s offering to developers to work with AI agents in safe environment.
Built for agentic workflows
Run experimental AI libraries or autonomous agents with a reduced attack surface to protect your host operating system.
Move fast with cutting-edge tools in a sandbox, where you control what AI agents have access to.
Workshop for safely working with AI agents.
And because it is a snap package it can be installed on other distributions of Linux.
As an amusing aside, I recently read an article about a University professor who wrote an article warning students not to use AI in their course work. It turned out that the professor wrote her article using AI!
Well, I thought it funny.
The problem with that idea is that it can be applied to just about every app in the system. LibreOffice, Firefox, Calculator, Rhythmbox, and so forth. We do you draw the line?
Ubuntu isn’t aimed at a minimalist installer as, say, Arch is. Ubuntu is aimed at your “typical” non-technical user, who tends to be a maximalist. If you miss out an item, they’ll complain: “I installed Ubuntu, and it doesn’t even have a word processor!” By the time you reply, “But you can install it easily!” they’ve already replaced it with Windows and told all of their friends and colleagues.
These days, AI is part of a competitive edge (like it or not; it’s just a fact of modern life), and the companies which Ubuntu competes against will all be adding AI. If you want Ubuntu to keep growing and remain popular — which you should, because it helps to pay for it! — this is something that we should welcome, not fight.
As @yasirel explained, you can always uninstall afterwards. Or, if you prefer the minimalist approach, choose that at install time. Many will continue to use the maximalist version, while some will continue to use the minimalist version. I’m part of the former crowd. It’s likely that you are part of the latter crowd.
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As I wrote in another thread there is one middle of the road option of running AI in a secure environment provided that Proton Foundation is used with Ubuntu. Within Proton is Lumo AI which is encrypted. Lumo can be taught Ubuntu lingo. at least that is what I am experimenting with. But all these Agents suffer from amnesia once you hit Token limits. So I have evolved a protocol to overcome memory loss.
Road map from Ubuntu 26.10 and the future
Those with dietary allergies should look for a different restaurant.
.
That statement, repeated often for many things, is dismissive of people’s preferences, and disrespectful of people’s time and concerns for being required to “cleanup without breaking”, because there are always cases where purging doesn’t take into account the need for keeping something that has common usage for more than the “unwanted packages”.
To clarify my stance, choosing to not want AI, does not imply choosing to not want other applications that are not AI-based but “traditionally” included. If you say that choosing minimalist implies I will not get that set of non-AI apps, that is once again an indication of not respecting those that have heretofore chosen to make Ubuntu their preferred service provider for their Desktop or Server installations.
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Well, the contrary argument is that it’s disrespectful to expect Canonical to tailor the installation process for each person’s particular bias.
For example, some people strongly dislike snap, but it’s not practical to have Canonical tailor the installation process to allow you to skip its installation.
As I said, where do you draw the line? Why should snap get special treatment? Why should AI get special treatment? If you can give a compelling answer to the latter question, it would be worth raising a feature request on Launchpad. But, in the absence of a compelling answer, it boils down to “because I don’t want it”.
The fact is that Canonical decides what to put in its distribution, just as every other distribution owner does with theirs. We can make feature requests, but the requests need to be compelling, not just based on personal preferences.
This might sound glib, but it is not meant to be.
The stance and attitude reflected by both of your answers addressed to me is likely one of the major drivers behind people who are loyal to Windows/MacOS to stay where they are, instead of considering Linux, because, unfortunately there is the frequent comeback which is off-putting for the “Customer”, as opposed to the tendency by “Providers” to not desire offering beyond their conceived notion of what should be provided, reinforced by their tendency to discount the viewpoints that run counter to their own.
Such a sad state of affairs!
Formation of “tribes” always leads to conflicts between those tribes. Such conflicts never end unless bridges are built for 2-way exchange, as opposed to lobbing over the fences with the hopes that you can scare the others into your camp! The latter is the path to mutual-obliteration.
Thank you for hearing me out, hoping that it will stimulate reflection.
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Eric, this isn’t about Linux. I would have given the same type of reply to the same type of demand had it been Windows or MacOS or Android; or Google Docs or Microsoft Word or LibreOffice; or, indeed, a physical product, say Peugeot or Citroen.
You can’t expect a company to accede to every person’s request based on nothing more than preference. The result would be chaos. There has to be a compelling reason for a company to consider a request.
Your request has nothing to explain why it should happen. There is no compelling reason; in fact, no reason whatsoever is given.
So, I repeat: If you have a compelling reason, please go ahead and raise a feature request on Launchpad. If it’s compelling, you might find a tremendous amount of support, including from me. But, without a reason, I can tell you now that it will be rejected for the very reasons that I have explained — more work for Canonical for no apparent benefit.
No objection to your general stance but I wouldn’t want to have to seek the CPU/GPU hogs out to disable them. There is a considerable cost to running “Ai” — do note the quotes. An OS of any description should use as few resources as possible, so as to leave as many as possible for the users’ own purposes; which is one of the reasons why I have left the Windows world for good — Win 7 was my last actual hands-on experience.
I’ve finally come around to freeing up enough space to put Ubuntu 26.04 through its paces on a VM and I must say, I am very positively surprised, because the ubuntu-desktop-minimal installation uses just about 1 GiB of RAM after a cold boot; which is just a few tens of MiB more than lubuntu-desktop-minimal, arguably the lightest of the flavors. So I get a full-blown Ubuntu GNOME experience for not much more RAM than the rather spartan light weight flavor, which is really really impressive; or Lubuntu just dropped the ball somewhere. 
Such OOTB experience is unlikely to be repeated with a 28.04 loaded with all kinds of “agents”, which will require RAM and, even more crucially, CPU/GPU cycles, and lots of them, I reckon. And I do value my piece and quiet, for I have spent considerable time getting rid of anything spinning up CPU cores and hence the the cooling fan when not strictly required. I didn’t have to disable much of anything OS-related that came OOTB. A constantly running speech to text system will put an end to that, I’m sure.
By all means, advertise the heck out of it to new users and make it as easy as possible (one click, or something) on them to get it, if they want it.
Thank you everyone for your information & opinions!
i can see the plans of AI in ubuntu will be snaps able to purge
but for novice users if they are installed by default, they might
not realize that right away and get stuck in a vanilla ubuntu full
of AI elements.
Let’s take a look how things evolved with firefox snap, automatic
updates resulted in the firefox AI enhancements wich were ENABLED
by default, the user needs to killswitch if OFF and cant even use translations
without AI etc…
or lets say google chrome that suddenly downloads a 4GB hidden package
for AI (and yes i realize chrome is not officialy supported)
Can we agree we dont want a bloated Ubuntu AI experience by default
with all sorts of AI elements the end users maybe dont like, or
at least give the user the choice?
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If the AI were to be running by default, then I would absolutely agree that this is a compelling reason to contest the inclusion.
But, I didn’t see anything about having this running by default. I only saw a statement that it would be installed by default. As Ubuntu’s target market is aimed at modern machines, I don’t see this as a problem; it’s not going to be gigabytes worth.
As an experiment, a week or two ago, I installed AI on my computer. Before I downloaded an AI model, it took hardly any space at all. Only the model itself took a sizeable amount. The model wouldn’t be included on the ISO (well, it would be seriously weird if it were) partly because the models go out of date pretty quickly, and partly because the ISO size would grow out of control.
If you read the announcement thread more closely you will find that the model snaps will have to be downloaded at install time, we’re only talking about local model snaps here (not any remote agents that phone home) that are simply too big to fit on the install media so I highly doubt this can go in any way unnoticed for an end user (there will likely have to be a (preseedable) prompt in the installer that asks you for permission to download the AI bits) …
PS: I’d also expect our installer team to be clever enough to first check if the HW even has an NPU to actually be able to make use of AI at all and to not offer the model download when there is no HW to support them…
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First of all Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation. Canonical (Ubuntu) had no control over the decision to introduce AI search in Firefox.
The decision by Canonical to create a snap packaged version of Firefox and make it the default version over the Debian packaged version had nothing to do with AI.
The decision to snap package Firefox is validated, in my mind, by Mozilla’s decision to take over the maintenance of the Firefox snap. Doing so means that we get frequent updates to Firefox. This is fast and more frequent than the way things happened in the past when Firefox was only a Debian packaged application.
The existence of Snap packaging is making it possible for developers to work with AI agents in a secure and safe manner. If snap packaging did not exist then something like it would be needed so that Ubuntu could continue to be a platform for computer programmers.
We will not be getting “a bloated AI experience by default.”
Some of us have tried to reason with you. We have quoted Canonical management and software engineers.
You are not alone in clinging to a point of view. We all have a choice. There are alternatives.
I will still be using Ubuntu in the foreseeable future and I will be thankful for the gift of Ubuntu.
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