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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#71

Post by inahga »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #31

> primarily due to the very large fraction of entitled users I think anyone working in serious open source projects just need to learn to ignore those users. I definitely would have the attitude of "I'm perfectly fine if no one uses my product" and have a lot of fun banning entitled users left and right.

To me, unless there is an exchange of money and a signed statement of work, I have absolutely zero entitlement as a user. And the maintainers are well within their rights (by law and social contract) to tell me to go away. I wish this was a more adopted mindset.

It’s why things like CentOS being abandoned, terraform licensing, et. al. never bothered me. I’m not paying them, so :shrug:.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#72

Post by shermantanktop »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #31

> primarily due to the very large fraction of entitled users I think anyone working in serious open source projects just need to learn to ignore those users. I definitely would have the attitude of "I'm perfectly fine if no one uses my product" and have a lot of fun banning entitled users left and right.

Easier said than done. If you care about users, and then realize most of them are jerks, it’s deflating. Maybe the secret is to not care about users, but the risk is that you end up doing self-gratifying work that leads nowhere.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#73

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

prododev wrote: post #33
galoisscobi wrote: post #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…

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…

Yep. I've been working on Ardour for 25 years now, and it took me 7-10 years to develop the right kind of skin for dealing with "user feedback". For me, the right kind of skin was basically to shed such stuff like water off a duck's back. Whether someone is saying "I've been using Logic for 10 years and this is so much easier and intuitive" or "You should be ashamed for asking anyone to pay for this steaming pile of shit" (both real quotes), I had to be able to shrug and carry on with whatever my development priorities were anyway.

That said, I sympathize very much with Marcan on this project: getting the basic infrastructure for Linux operational on new hardware inflames passions much more than a niche project like a DAW.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#74

Post by dark-star »

Trying to push Rust code into Linux and after a year calling it a "failure of leadership" when people are reluctant don't welcome your code with open arms is not very professional. It has taken other projects decades of out-of-tree maintenance until their code finally got in (RTLinux).

The correct way would have been to maintain the Rust code out-of-tree, for as long as it would take, which would also somewhat prove that you are ready to maintain that code over a longer time period.

Sad that this led to him stepping down, but maybe others in the Asahi Linux circle are ready to keep maintaining the code out-of-tree until everyone is ready for it

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#75

Post by kombine »

talldayo wrote: post #17
bezier-curve wrote: post #4

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 unsust…

As that kernel maintainer clearly stated this was not because the code was awful, but because the code was written in Rust and it was therefore cancer.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#76

Post by codr7 »

Mizza wrote: post #64

Marcan is a legend, it's a shame it ended like this. The communities around certain software technologies can act incredibly hostile and entitled towards developers, paradoxically even more so for free and open source projects. I've seen this many times happen in audio production and game emulation software. But Marcan clearly has true hacker spirit, I'd wager we'll see him again in the future with an equally cool pr…

Starting social media shame wars over minor disagreements isn't exactly what I would call hacker spirit, but whatever.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#77

Post by krapp »

echelon wrote: post #56
sphars wrote: 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 t…

If the opinions they don't agree with exist on Hacker News, and they do (check the dead comments in just about any thread where Asahi Linux comes up) then it isn't an unfair assessment at all.

What is the "it" that you're insisting they "deal with," here? What is the "drama?"

Also what value does bigotry, homophobia and transphobia have in open discourse that it must be preserved? None of that is on topic for Hacker News, why must it be on topic for the Asahi Linux community?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#78

Post by thw8419 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #50
cogman10 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I think it went too far. The fact is, you need buy in from other devs and if a dev won't buy in you need to work out a way to avoid them or avoid conflict. It sucks, it slows things down, but frankly making it a "them vs us" is a sure fire way to make them oppose any change you want to make. Public shaming even more disastrous as there's no better way to entrench someone in a position.

It's deeply ironic that he's complaining about kernel maintainers supposedly forming secret cliques. However... this is the same man who made a sock puppet V-Tuber account, and acts in every way like they are two people; even though they've accidentally on-stream shared the system username, shared they have exactly the same kernel version, same KDE configuration, same login, same time zone, even (if I recall correctl…

Even if he did that, which I'm not in a position to judge:

That is an entirely different situation from facing inner circles in an open source project while contributing to a major port.

Sock puppets aren't taken seriously while the word of the inner circle is taken as gospel.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#79

Post by diggan »

__float wrote: post #42
cogman10 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I think it went too far. The fact is, you need buy in from other devs and if a dev won't buy in you need to work out a way to avoid them or avoid conflict. It sucks, it slows things down, but frankly making it a "them vs us" is a sure fire way to make them oppose any change you want to make. Public shaming even more disastrous as there's no better way to entrench someone in a position.

I'm not entirely convinced they meant to truly make a public hall of shame. It sounded to me like a list of "friends who want to get more involved, I'll let you know who to avoid". Then, I read the interactions that sparked that post, and I could totally understand the frustration from OP's part. Linus being unwilling to take a real stand on maintainers blocking Rust just because doesn't really help.

Someone wrote (https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98...):

> To back up Sima here, we don't need grandstanding, brigading, playing

> to the crowd, streamer drama creation or any of that in discussions

> around this.

Marcan replied (https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98...):

> If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas.

Then Linus replied (https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/CAHk-=wi=ZmP2=TmHsFSU...):

> However, I will say that the social media brigading just makes me not want to have anything at all to do with your approach.

> Because if we have issues in the kernel development model, then social media sure as hell isn't the solution. The same way it sure as hell wasn't the solution to politics.

To me, it sure sounds like Marcan is making the case that they tried other venues, didn't feel like it worked, so they resolved to using their social media following to shame kernel developers if they didn't stop.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#80

Post by superkuh »

Ygg2 wrote: post #43
superkuh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Did you read the article? Did you read the rest of it? Sure Apple being not as great to develop drivers, but ~99% of the article is about displeasure working with Linux maintainers. EDIT: Here is the breakdown by paragraphs. | Paragraph # | Tone | | ----------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | History recap | | 2 | History recap | | 3 | mentions Apple and M1 in po…

[flagged]
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