Hmm,
Let’s look at the 2028 futures I’m able to see again. The future when an initiative started now-ish could hand off to a working group responsible for an edition that the initial base image may grow into.
In the best version of that future that I can see…
the nova kernel drivers are well established and vulkan compute becomes the defacto standard for accessing local hardware and somehow magically we don’t even need cuda. We can just do all of it in the base image. Fantastic future from a technical perspective. Clean.
In that future, I still see a need to promote an AI developer desktop output. I still think its a strategic output. We just avoid the policy complexity of having to deal with out of tree open source kernel drivers and proprietary cuda userspace to get maximum hardware enablement.
I don’t see the strategic need for the base output changing. And there lies the disagreement that is surfacing the hardest conversations. Even if there are technical solves for the hardware enablement in that time frame, this project community is still left with needing to have the conversation about whether to build and promote an output for AI developers is strategic. what I see people reacting to most strongly in the back half of this thread now is that question and my answer to it.
Even if we choose to delay this as a council level inititive until after the nova drivers are here, because the nova driver availability makes the technical work less burdensome, the larger conversation about whether its strategic to promote the output for the stated use cases is still there.
I feel it would be inappropriate for me to not step in front of that conversation and tell you what I think about the strategic importance of an output aimed at developers. I believe that the base image that comes out of this work needs to be an edition with its own working group in the 2028 timeframe.