Hector, I know you deleted your account here but in the off chance you browse by - thank you for all of your hard work and knowledge sharing on this over the years. Hope you find time to take a long well deserved 'mental health break' and destress.
Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#102> 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 always tell this story about working with sales at a job where I worked in tech support. Sales would call me up and ask why I hadn't talked to their client about their very important ticket.
I would tell them:
"I have 5 P1 tickets, 8 P2 tickets, and dozens of P3 tickets. Your ticket is a P3 ticket."
They would ask that I change it to a P1. I would. Then they would call me an hour later asking me about the ticket and I would tell them:
"I have 6 P1 tickets."
That's when they'd understand ;)
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#103I don't think it's the first time, nor the last, we'll see maintainers and otherwise really great people being turned off from FOSS because of the massive weight that entitled outsiders and toxic "collaborators" seem to add.
So on that, is there any guides for FOSS maintainers out there about how to deal with the emotional toll of FOSS, with a focus on self-care, how to say "No", generally just how to deal with the people/human part of FOSS, without focusing on the technical details?
We have a ton of guides from companies and individuals how to make the technical, infrastructure, product, software parts work, but I don't remember ever seeing a guide how to deal with emotions one might feel when doing this sort of work.
I think I'm lucky that it's relatively easy for me to tell people to fuck off when I find them not contributing or being toxic, but judging by the amount of people who feel a real emotional toll, border-lining to the feelings of burnout while working on their dream projects, this doesn't seem to come as easily to everyone, so having a guide/manual about this would be amazing.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.
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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#105> 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…
No good deed goes unpunished.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#106Earlier 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.
That's not correct, the point is that while the comment might be flag-killed, the subsequent posts in that thread are not and are visible to search engines. For example: if you go to this post [1] from the prior thread while in private/incognito/whatever mode you can see the posts underneath a flagged comment even though you can't see the comment itself. And there are some comments there by other users that, despite being flagged, are still indexable and visible
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#107I 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…
I see where the article mentions complaints about Github and commit messages, can you quote the portion about driver code quality?
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#108Drama needs to be worked against, not expanded upon.
A lot of what I’m reading seems to make me feel that drama was… not avoided by this person, putting it charitably.
And I'm someone who I believe still sponsors them! Asahi Linux is an awesome, and dare I say necessary, project.
There is value in learning how to relinquish a constant "defensive posture" mentally. (I have struggled with, and am still working through this, personally, btw.) Heading a project like this surely challenges everyone's stoicism, though.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#109One thing that I notice often - people just do not take 5 minutes to appreciate someone or send 5 dollars to a project that they use daily etc. Not just in the software world, but life in general. Someone I know works full time, takes care of her two kids, takes care of her husband. Kids are almost teens now, but she gets zero support from them or her husband. Or even an occasional thanks. I see this everywhere, this is just one example.
Are we so busy or egoistic or ignorant that we can't stop and say thanks? What is even more worse is the entitlement. People who wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone (even their own families) are usually the loudest and the most entitled ones.
I don't know if this is the case around the world (probably is?) and I don't know what the solution is. It just sucks
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#110Earlier 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…
How does having an alter-ego
make it deeply ironic that he complains about secret cliques? I don’t get it.
I’ve been supporting Hector since week 1 of the Asahi project and I think it’s a shame he’s thrown in the towel but I can understand why.
I don’t know enough about kernel development to have an opinion about about the Kernel policy of “no aliases” for contributions.
I certainly don’t care that some people think it’s weird for a man to have a female alter ego.
Maybe those things matter to you.