AlpineBSD announced – an AI-free FOSS OS

Just days after Daemonarchy, there's another new OS in the BSD family – and one that is heading determinedly in almost the opposite direction.

AlpineBSD is so new that it barely exists yet. There are no installation media available, though it's possible to manually bootstrap an installation. What AlpineBSD does already have is an AI policy, and the plan is to avoid "the output of generative AI models (e.g. LLMs)" as far as possible:

"Any software whose code, documentation, binaries, or other assets include, in any part, the output of a generative AI tool such as an LLM, is considered 'tainted' for our purposes."

REG AD

The core idea is to combine the kernel of NetBSD with "a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible."

REG AD

Back in 2024, the NetBSD project made its position on AI plain. Its commit guidelines say that "code generated by a Large Language Model […] is presumed to be tainted code."

Back in July, Linus Torvalds stated that "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects". Since then, NetBSD has seen a spike in donations and interest.

For someone mainly used to Linux, trying to install NetBSD is a little like hopping in a time machine to 30 years ago, and we speak from personal experience of Linux in the mid-1990s. As we mentioned when Slackware turned 30 a few years ago, back in 1996, this vulture tried Slackware 3.0 on his own hardware, and we never did manage to install it.

We tried NetBSD 11 a couple of months ago, and despite considerable help from the folks on the NetBSD-users mailing list, we failed to get the CDE desktop to start.

As an example, installing software on NetBSD is not the easy, comfortable task it is on Linux. It does have a package manager for handling binary packages: it's called pkgin, but as the NetBSD FAQ mentions, it's an optional extra. You must manually tick a box in the setup program to install pkgin with the rest of the OS, and when we tried NetBSD 9.3 four years ago, we didn't know that, overlooked that checkbox, and had to find a way to add pkgin later. (It is quite tricky to install a package manager when you don't have a package manager to install it with.)

This time around, we discovered that pkgin sometimes doesn't complete the installation process for you – it just leaves a text file in a destination directory somewhere, and you're expected to know that, go there, read it, and do any further steps yourself.

The NetBSD community has been quietly going its own way since 1993. It has its own ideas about what is normal, and its users expect that. Some folks on the mailing list told us that they never use binary packages anyway – they compile what they need from source code.

AlpineBSD's ports repository and source code are hosted on Sourcehut, under the account of sircmpwn, better known as Drew DeVault. We have quoted DeVault a few times over the years: we've often found that his views align with our own in various ways… such as about the best laptops ever made, and on simplicity in Linux distro design, or even on dot-com billionaires at FOSDEM.

REG AD

Alpine's tools are quite well-suited to being adapted to other systems. We have previously mentioned the use of its packaging tool, APK, in the GNU-free Chimera Linux, which uses much of the FreeBSD userland, and also in Adélie Linux.

We will follow AlpineBSD with interest. There's strong appeal in the plan of combining perhaps the best-known, longest-established AI-free Unix-like kernel with the user-facing parts of pretty much the smallest and cleanest Linux distro there is. The AI advocates often warn LLM skeptics that they risk being left behind. Well, here's an OS for those who don't want to surf the AI wave. ®