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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

51–60 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#52

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 contr…

Open source is just what the name means though, the source is open.

It doesn't also imply something like open contributions.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.

They require an account with showdead enabled so they are not being indexed by default.

Huh, interesting, someome should tell Asahi this.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#54

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…

> I wonder if the Asahi team is considering simply abandoning linux in favor of something more rust friendly

The entire point of Asahi is to run Linux on macOS (edit: on Mac hardware, not macOS). If they did what you’re suggesting it would be a completely different project.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#56
post #6

See also the response from the Asahi team: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/

At the top of the page:

> Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News.

> Asahi Linux developers are frequent targets of abuse on Hacker News. Despite our pleas, the moderators have not taken effective action to improve the situation.

> Overtly hateful content is often flagged on HN and not immediately visible. Unfortunately, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. That preserves the 'clean' image of the website, but the reduced moderation activity enables abuse to continue. 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.

> Please demand change within your community.

This is an unfair and gross assessment. I've lost some respect from Asahi for this.

They're calling for extreme moderation of opinions they don't agree with, which is the opposite of open discourse.

Asahi: deal with it. You're Streisand Effecting this. Your inability to handle drama is actually causing more drama. Just turn the other cheek and ignore it.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#57
Unfortunately it is not the first time a good developer leaves the project for a famous "Linu(s)x shitshow", and it will not be the latest...

I don't believe in the Linux project since a few years now, especially as "the bearded ones" are not interested in moving the project to a certain future, but only jerking on their old own code.

Good luck for the futur Hector, and thanks for what you managed to do until now with your team.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#58

> 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…

This is every successful product, small, medium, large. I've never ever worked on a big corporate or small personal project and not experienced this. The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority". You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment…

Yes, this is pretty normal; in paid products I even find it's less aggressive than in free things. But I have a hard and frozen shell around my vital organs to just politely and friendly point to the place in queue and where to donate to speed it up. For $10k I will build your cpu temp proc, if that's not an option then it's in pos #17463 of my task list.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#59
I really feel for Hector.

Open source can be brutal, especially with larger and well established projects.

I contribute to several projects as a well recognized person in my field, not at their scale, but everything they say rings true.

Established developers often push back extremely hard on anything new, until and unless it aligns with their current goals. I’ve had maintainers shut me down without hearing out the merits, only to come back a year later when whatever company they work for suddenly sees it as important.

Project leads who will shift goalposts to avoid confronting the clear hostility their deputies show.

I’ve had OSS users call me personal number, or harass me over email for not having their pet interest prioritized over everything else. Often that’s because I’m blocked by the maintainers.

Open source can be extremely brutal and it’s a battle of stamina and politics as much as it’s one of technical merit.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#60

> 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…

This is every successful product, small, medium, large. I've never ever worked on a big corporate or small personal project and not experienced this. The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority". You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment…

I agree that this is needed. It doesn't stop the person requesting the feature from asking for a meeting to explain why and just whining that they need it the whole time and saying they shouldn't have pay anything to get it addressed right now.

Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly and I never had more than 1 meeting a quarter with really toxic people and they were at least paying for the product and maintenance so hearing them out was part of the job. It unfortunate to get to the point where you view customer requests as antagonistic, but I can see how it happens. Some people really feel entitled, and some have a job to do and limited resources or control to do it in.

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