Live data from Hacker News

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

11–20 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#11
post #7

I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.

Maintaining the Linux kernel is all about gatekeeping. How else do you keep out bad code?

What does social media have to do with bad code, though?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#12
God bless. Asahi introduced me to fedora/gnome, it feels rock solid on my m1 MacBook, and it's now my daily driver on a 2014 Intel Mac mini

Wishing I had donated before, I'll sign up for opencollective now. I can only imagine the anticlimactic nature of releasing the emulation stack for gaming [0] and not seeing any increase in interest financially. One wonders what funding might have made it more worthwhile than simply passing the hat.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#13
> But then also came the entitled users. This time, it wasn’t about stealing games, it was about features. “When is Thunderbolt coming?” “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” (nobody ever complained when compared to x86 laptops…) “I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one).

This sounds so rough. I can't imagine pouring your heart out into this labor of love and continue to have to face something like this. Back in the early days of Quora, when it used to be good, there used to be a be nice be respectful policy (they might still have it), I wonder if something like that would be helpful for open source community engagement.

Regardless, major props to Marcan for doing the great work that he did, our community is lucky to have people like him!

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#15
post #3

It's a shame to see but inevitable when trying to get open software working on such a proprietary platform with so many hardware cut corners and incomplete/non-standard implementations. Just an insane amount of work of the most frustrating kind. What they did manage to do was incredible... but Apple is Apple.

This isn't an Apple issue. Maybe Linux on Apple is inherently more problematic, but the issue here came from Linux maintainers hostility towards Rust.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#17

I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.

It's not really unprecedented. Reminds me of Paragon Software trying to merge their code for an NTFS driver and getting told-off because the driver code was so awful: https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/06/github_merges_useless...

If you want your code merged in the kernel, you have to think about things from Linus' perspective. You cannot in any circumstances try to shame someone into adopting an enormous and unsustainable workload.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#18

I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.

"spreading awareness about a position" isn't a very accurate way to describe what happened. This is the guy who said he wanted to use social media to create a "hall of shame" for kernel developers. Of course Linus told him to knock it off, that's ridiculously unprofessional behavior.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#19

I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.

You’re right, it’s mostly any open source code projects too. I’ve tried to contribute to projects where they ignore my merge request and take my code and merge it in under their own account. I call this behavior “demonstrating the moat” in which the Maintainers are more concerned with maintaining a moat around their project that they actively go out of their way to prevent contribution under the guise that your contribution did not correctly cross the moat. Even if the moat is mostly decorative and ceremonial.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#20
post #7

I think if I was indicted by Linus and told I'm a problem over spreading awareness about a position on social media, I too would burn out pretty quickly. That's how you crush motivation. There's a deeper issue in open-source culture where harshness and gatekeeping drive away passionate contributors.

Maintaining the Linux kernel is all about gatekeeping. How else do you keep out bad code?

From what I've seen this is excellent code, some people just really don't like Rust.
Post reply on HN