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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#162> 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…
I don't get that complaint. None of those messages demand anything from anyone or berate Asahi Linux. It's just useful feedback and questions.
This is the same person that resigned as a kernel maintainer (focus on Apple/Arm unsurprisingly) about a week ago.
I don't know this person so this is completely baseless speculation but I assume they are "going through it" in some way and experiencing significant burnout, which based on my own experience in the past has a way of (negatively) amplifying all sorts of interactions that are related to the source of your burnout.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#163I 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.
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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#164Earlier 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…
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 an…
That's when they understand that they have to start fighting their peers and talking with the big boss to get their P1 ticket moved in front of the other P1 tickets.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#165Earlier 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…
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 th…
> Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly [...] hearing them out was part of the job
Does it have to be a meeting? Although it's about sales calls, I'm reminded of https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 )
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#166I 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.
Ok, so you are just "spreading awareness" but Linus is "indicting". I guess it is good if you and Linus go their separate ways.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#167Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o ( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed... ) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line"), it does a good job of explaining the difficulties that Linux maintainers face and why they make the choices they do. It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining…
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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#168> 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…
Never ever give away anything for free if you intend to support it is an evergreen advice.
Selling ads? Using it as a gateway to a commercial product? Selling support? Have some genius business plan that allows you to make money in the future? Fine, give it away no strings attached but expecting that users will be grateful is a mistake developers keep repeating. The free users are just as entitled, even more entitled as they don’t have a price tag for your efforts and don’t have a document specifying what are your obligations so they can assume scope of entitlements anyway they wish.
Since you gave it for free, you can’t refund an unhappy customers to make it go away. If it looks like a product, You will be stuck with people who think they did their part by using your products and you failed them. Some may make it a full time job to take a revenge on this injustice.
I’m not even sure that these users are at fault, you actually took something in exchange(like fame, street cred etc) and you are not delivering your part.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
That's when they understand that they have to start fighting their peers and talking with the big boss to get their P1 ticket moved in front of the other P1 tickets.
Yup, but it gets them out of my hair, and they understand the support guy isn't in a position to wave a magic wand for them. If sales guy wins his fight with the folks in charge and I get time / resources to work on his thing, fine with me.
Otherwise he knows he's 6th in line.
Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead
#170Well 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.
Well, I wonder if this is a good time for people to reconsider what they actually want out of Asahi. Things that I'm sure are on the list are open source, able to run the tools they want (standard gnu userland?), docker, maybe gnome/kde? I am not convinced that the linux kernel specifically is on that list.