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See also the response from the Asahi team: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
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 hard enough in physical spaces to remove abusers (usually the abused just stop showing up), I can't imagine there's an answer for preventing this kind of behavior in online spaces
Second, what’s the drama? I read the blog, and I’m guessing that on top of being burned out, which sucks, Marcan didn’t like a kernel developer using the phrase “we are the thin blue line” implies he’s politically liberal, in the US sense. He then says he may have been toxic on Mastodon, which might have got him secretly canceled?
All that said, I found his assessment of downstream v. upstream economics (if you can’t successfully upstream you’re doomed to rebase off a massive patch list) pretty interesting. I think the way it is now is the only way that’s good for users — if downstream forks could somehow maintain viability longer term, we would be splitting, e.g. security budgets, performance budgets, etc. I get that it sucks for a group working to upstream, and I am in no way shocked to hear personal politics plays some role in success upstreaming — open source is largely a personal / social capital economy - I guess all that said, hopefully the new Asahi maintainers can work well across what seems like ideology bounds. Maybe?
See also the response from the Asahi team: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
"Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities."
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.
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.
marcan had indicated donations are down, and it's hard to support ones livelihood just from donations alone - especially when they are down.
https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/c5a49bcb-45cf-4295-80...
See also the response from the Asahi team: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
"Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities."
Well that's unfortunate. It seems like there's a balancing act between the benefits of writing drivers in Rust (easier, more maintainable), and getting those drivers mainlined (apparently soul-destroying, morale killing), I wonder if the Asahi team is considering simply abandoning linux in favor of something more rust friendly (redox being an obvious candidate, but maybe one of the BSDs?). Given the narrow set of har…
They are relying heavily on mesa. I'd also assume that GNU stuff is also pretty essential.
Perhaps Android would be possible? It has a HAL that might be easier to work with than the raw linux kernel. The android devs have put in a lot of effort to make downstream driver development not painful. With android, they'd also still have GNU stuff available.
The big issue is non-linux will mean every single open source tool may have a compatibility problem. You also end up dumping a huge amount of capabilities (like running docker containers).