I've been thinking along the same lines, actually. I'd personally love to switch to a no-AI kernel fork.

It seems someone has at least done the work to find the last commit not tainted by slop. So that's one tiny tiny baby step in the direction of such a fork, I guess.

Honestly, I'd happily sacrifice the newest/latest features of Linux. I could just stick with version 6.16.7 (which according to the above link is slop-free), except that some fairly impactful vulnerabilities have been discovered in Linux lately.

I use Gentoo and configure/build my own kernel manually, so I could also theoretically do some research and see how many of the vulnerabilities that are actively a problem in 6.16.7 are in parts of the kernel that I explicitly disable anyway.

I'm no C developer, though, let alone Linux kernel hacker. If I had the chops, I might honestly be considering making a fork myself right now.