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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#191

Post by bayindirh »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #153
bayindirh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Putting my dusty Linux Distro Maintainer Hat on] First of all, I wholeheartedly applaud Marcan for carrying the project this far. They, both as individuals and as a team proper, did great things. What I can say is a rest is well deserved at this point, because he really poured his soul into this and worn himself down. On the other hand, I'll need to say something, however not in bad faith. He needs to stop fighting…

It's not just that "people are hard" - it was clear that this will end up this way the moment marcan started ranting on social media about having to send kernel patches via e-mails. Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code. Not realizing that is a sure road to…

> Not realizing that is a sure road to burnout (and yes, I'm just as guilty of that myself).

Humans are shaped by experience. This is both a boon and a curse. I have been also been on the hot end of the stick and burned myself down, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. Understanding that I don't want to go through this anymore was the point I started to change.

> Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code.

Writing the code is at most 5% of software development IME. This is what I always say to people I work with. I absolutely love writing code, but there are so many and more important activities around that, I can't just ignore them and churn out code.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#192

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

freedomben wrote: post #94
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a similar thought. The tone of the messages was a little rough and they definitely could have used some better tact knowing that the project developers would see it, but ultimately those are just factual statements delivered with brutal bluntness.

Right exactly. They're not tactful, but they also weren't in bad faith. Marcan should have taken 5 minutes to realize that he's the boss, he's the one doing the work, nobody is entitled to anything in free software and that if people want a feature sooner they can either fund the project or kick rocks. Anyone who's been in open source for over 2, definitely 3 understands this.

> I miss having free time where I can relax and not worry about the features we haven’t shipped yet. I miss making music. I miss attending jam sessions. I miss going out for dinner with my friends and family and not having to worry about how much we haven’t upstreamed. I miss being able to sit down and play a game or watch a movie without feeling guilty.

This is the big problem really. He should have just turned down his work hours to a regular 40 a week, asked for more donations to pay more people and asked for more volunteer help. And honestly, probably therapy.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#193

Post by saagarjha »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #118
danw1979 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Are you a woman? Have you asked women how they feel about this?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#194

Post by bayindirh »

e40 wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Putting my dusty Linux Distro Maintainer Hat on] First of all, I wholeheartedly applaud Marcan for carrying the project this far. They, both as individuals and as a team proper, did great things. What I can say is a rest is well deserved at this point, because he really poured his soul into this and worn himself down. On the other hand, I'll need to say something, however not in bad faith. He needs to stop fighting…

100% agree. For the last few years, I've been saying the following regularly (to friends, family and coworkers): communication is the hardest thing humans will ever do. Period. Going to the moon, launching rockets, building that amazing app... the hardest thing of all is communicating with other people to get it done. As a founder (for 40+ years and counting) I manage a lot of different type of people and communicati…

> Humans have a very, very tough time assuming the point of view of another. That is the root of terrible communication, but assumptions are right up there as a big second.

That's very true. I recommend some people to read "The Four Agreements", because that thin book has real potential to improve people's lives through active and passive communication.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#195

Post by kayodelycaon »

richrichardsson wrote: post #130
jeroenhd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Open source attracts some of the very worst users I don't think it's even just that, it seems to be something about the price. I work on a piece of closed-source free software, and we consistently get support requests from unbelievably entitled assholes. The worst of them are the ones that have some technical knowledge; they will not only demand things be fixed or implemented, they make completely erroneous stateme…

> I PAID FOR THIS YOU MUST FIX IT!!!1!

Sounds like a great time to give them a refund because they didn’t get the product they thought they were getting.

Too passive aggressive? :)

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#196

Post by cogman10 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #125
cogman10 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the narrow set of hardware they're aiming to support and that they're writing many of their own drivers _anyway_ (and so are not relying as much on the large # of existing linux drivers), that approach might be more viable. They are relying heavily on mesa. I'd also assume that GNU stuff is also pretty essential. Perhaps Android would be possible? It has a HAL that might be easier to work with than the raw li…

> They are relying heavily on mesa Isn't mesa portable? Or are there parts that are OS-specific? > With android, they'd also still have GNU stuff available. I don't follow; Android is a non-GNU Linux distro. Or do you mean that being on Linux makes GNU stuff easy? (But then, GNU runs happily on BSDs and other unix-likes)

> Isn't mesa portable? Or are there parts that are OS-specific?

IDK. I'm not familiar with mesa enough to know how portable it is. That said, I do know that it's primarily deployed on linux. An issue with portability is simply that when big projects like mesa are developed, non-linux environments are rarely developed (No clue, for example, if you can build mesa for BSD).

> Or do you mean that being on Linux makes GNU stuff easy?

Mostly this. I don't think, for example, those GNU tools will port over to redox. Building them targeting android is a snap.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#197

Post by __turbobrew__ »

gsck wrote: post #139

I'm not sure about why they are upset with the issue of upstreaming the changes into the kernal. They want to upstream drivers for a device that the creator of clearly has no interest in allowing others to use outside of their walled garden. The knowledge around it is from a massive , albeit impressive, RE effort. Who is going to support it? Where is the demand for it? It would be different if Apple were to provide p…

Agreed, supporting apple devices is going to be a maintenance nightmare as it goes against the wishes of apple. At best, apple involuntarily makes reverse incompatible changes which breaks the drivers and at worst apple specifically sabotages the drivers to keep people in the walled garden.

This may be controversial but you also don’t have a right to merge in code to the kernel. If the maintainers don’t want rust code then you should write your drivers in C. And if you don’t like that you can maintain your own kernel tree in rust and take on the maintenance burden.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#198

Post by secondcoming »

ThatGuyRaion wrote: post #187

Marcan brings up plenty of good points regarding contributing to kernel.org being stuck in the 1990s. However, he's got no social skills nor does he have what it takes to man up and understand he won't get his way. Additionally I doubt that he really is dealing with stalkers to the degree that he is implying; real people don't talk about their stalkers so much. When I was stalked and harassed I kept the details light…

Yes, he’s clearly an extremely talented individual, but can’t seem to cope with not being the centre of other people’s worlds.

Undiagnosed burnout possibly also played a role here.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#199

Post by mietek »

Certhas wrote: post #171
nindalf wrote: post #93

Marcan 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…

It's also not truthful because many of the Rust maintainers are long time C contributors. Marcan also linked to this resignation of a Rust Maintainer: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240828211117.9422-1-wedsonaf@... which references this fantastic exchange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s I am not a C person, or a kernel level person, I just watch this from the sideline to learn something every now…

Your charitable reading is too charitable. One of the benefits of using types to help guarantee properties of programs (e.g. invariants) is that types do not get out of sync with the code, because they are part of the code, unlike documentation. The language implementation (e.g. the compiler) automatically checks that the types continue to match the rest of the code, in order to catch problems as early as possible.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#200

Post by [deleted] »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #63
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

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…

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