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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

Always funny to me to read something like that. HN has high moderation, one of the highest I've seen on modern fora, only a few steps below r/AskHistorians for example. I don't see this "abuse, bigotry, and nastiness" here and even if there are comments like that, they are quickly downvoted and dead.

I don't think HN has high moderation at all. High moderation would imply stricter and quicker punishment for making rancid remarks.

There were a number of remarks on the prior thread by people making conspiracy claims, harassment, insults etc. Some of them get flag-killed, some just down voted but ultimately the users on the site still remain.

Of course I'm not one to be above such a thing in terms of insulting people occasionally but HN is really quite permissive in terms of what you can post and get away with. It takes consistent and repeated bad behavior to get a warning, and even more to get banned. And if you're an expert in being politely venomous you can get away with even more. That's why the outside perception of HN tends to be a lot worse than the inward one.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#82

> 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…

> you can make it faster

Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminder that he did this on the Linux kernel mailing lists. If I was a Linux maintainer who found out that two of the people I'm talking to, are actually with high likelihood the same person secretly maintaining a charade, I wouldn't be far from banning both.

I also certainly wouldn't take any of his complaints about cliques or brigading with any seriousness or self-reflection afterwards.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Wow, what an uncharitable read. Are you aware of what that term means? He said it was not about literally shaming people, but showing what contributing to the kernel is like, and even clarified it wouldn't be for public consumption. It's a colloquialism for a resource where peers can learn from each other's mistakes. My high school Spanish class had a hall of shame. It's a magnitude more professional than the extreme…

> He said it was not about literally shaming people

The original message I read (https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98...) they quite explicitly said (verbatim): "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas."

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. I was developing some open source stuff before venturing to for-profit closed Source Software, and I was surprised that the paying customers were on average much nicer than those who got their stuff for free!

Great idea about the priority queue.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#87

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 would need to completely reset to do that. Do BSDs even have rust support for their drivers?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#88

> 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…

Open source attracts some of the very worst users. Often people pretending to be trying to help by "suggesting improvements", but just as often entitled people who want to work for free. I don't think policies will change that. It's just something you have to accept when you provide something useful to lots of people for free. Even if you use moderated environments for user feedback (adding the burden of constantly b…

That's what I get with my software projects. People tell me that it sucks and I suck at code and other projects have it better, and don't forget to waste months of your time rewriting to Rust, and don't you dare to use unsafe all over your code (see: actix drama)... sigh. But when asked to show their alternative they get silent. So as long as you keep being assertive this is fine. For everyone who comes and behaves like a drama queen you have to prove again and again that talk is cheap and code is how you get the job done. Or you simply ignore them.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#89
post #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 t…

If you’d face half the abuse, you’d be singing a different tune.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#90

> 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…

Open source attracts some of the very worst users. Often people pretending to be trying to help by "suggesting improvements", but just as often entitled people who want to work for free. I don't think policies will change that. It's just something you have to accept when you provide something useful to lots of people for free. Even if you use moderated environments for user feedback (adding the burden of constantly b…

> I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.

The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. I hope he'll be someday able to process what happened, why and reach appropriate conclusions. Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.

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