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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#821

Post by steveklabnik »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #818
Lammy wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years. It is unfortunately wrapped up in larger-scale outrage culture than just within tech/programming circles. Rust as a community is very gay and very trans: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve... https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur... To be clear I…

Please enlighten me why is this even a question on a language survey. I take many languages survey when they show up and Rust is the only one asking this.

Demographic questions are very normal on surveys.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#822

Post by Klonoar »

OJFord wrote: post #654
opan wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Marcan didn’t like a kernel developer using the phrase “we are the thin blue line” implies he’s politically liberal, in the US sense. From what I saw on urbandictionary, it seems more likely to be something cops in high crime areas in the UK say.

Anywhere really, it's just the phrase 'there's a thin [or fine] line between...' modified to say the police are that line, between lawful order & disorder. Apparently it's political in the US, I have no idea, but as I understand it the maintainer just means 'I am here reviewing the change to keep the kernel in good order'.

The maintainer might mean that, but words have meaning. That particular phrase is overly charged and carries a specific connotation surrounding the idea that police are the sole line keeping society in shape.

It’s a poor choice of words for such (relatively) public communication.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#823

Post by School-Cotton »

titmouse wrote: post #774
yoshuaw wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Abandoning Rust is a possibility, abandoning Linux is not. The Asahi developers have repeatedly and publicly asserted that were it not for Rust they would not have been able to achieve the level of quality required for the project, at the speed they did, with as small of a team as they have. From the article: > Rust is the entire reason our GPU driver was able to succeed in the time it did.

is there any particular reason it couldn't have been done in C? I'm having a little trouble believing these claims

Rust is just a better and more productive language than C (I guess this is a subjective statement, but obviously they would think so and I would agree with them).

Nobody ever claimed that it's impossible to write these drivers in C -- C is "Rust-complete" in the sense that you could in theory write a compiler that translates any Rust program to C.

They're just claiming that Rust allowed them to write much higher-quality code, much faster, which seems plausible.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#824

Post by School-Cotton »

ActorNightly wrote: post #642
margana wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of Asahi Linux is to create a Linux distribution that is compatible with Apple devices. Using Rust is not a goal of the project, it's just something they decided to use due to personal preference, and is making the process of upstreaming anything much harder. If anything, it works against them in achieving their goal. Abandoning Rust is a possibility, abandoning Linux is not.

Its sad that they chose Apple, instead of like investing time into the upcoming ARM laptops to make the Linux more optimized on them. That talent should not be wasted on tech jewelry.

The MBP is the best laptop hardware that exists on the market, by far. Why wouldn't someone who prefers Linux over macOS want to run Linux on it?

The existence of other ARM laptops is irrelevant; the reason MBPs are so good has little to do with ARM. Yes x86 makes the processor frontend more complicated but this doesn't make a big enough difference to come close to accounting for how much better the MBP is than its competitors. I would guess the biggest factors are Apple's ability to buy the entire run of TSMC's best process node, and the fact that they have a high level of competence at designing CPU cores and other hardware. The instruction set the core uses is just not that important in comparison.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#825

Post by musicale »

> We kept playing a cat and mouse game with the manufacturer to keep the platform open, only to see our efforts primarily used by people who just wanted to steal other people’s work, and very loudly felt entitled to it

#2 is the cause of #1.

Running commercial games for free has always been the killer application for jailbreaks/custom firmware for game systems. And game system emulators, for that matter.

It's sort of a perfect storm of gaming enthusiasts (particularly those with more free time than money) who want to run commercial games for free vs. companies like Nintendo who have an affinity for (overly) vigorous copyright and trademark enforcement, with jailbreak/custom firmware and emulator developers caught in the crossfire.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#826

Post by kobebrookskC3 »

mrtksn wrote: post #188
saagarjha wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying users can be incredibly entitled, sometimes even more than people who don’t pay you a dime. The problem is the moment you accept a cent people expect you to do work for them, regardless of whether the money is actually “worth” how much effort needs to go into a feature. The open source projects I’ve worked on get donations but sometimes people will put up like $10 for their pet feature which takes a week to wr…

You refund them and it’s solved. You don’t have that option with free users.

why not? just tell them "if you don't like it, you can get a refund" (aka fuck off)

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#827

Post by fastball »

layer8 wrote: post #790
Lammy wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years. It is unfortunately wrapped up in larger-scale outrage culture than just within tech/programming circles. Rust as a community is very gay and very trans: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve... https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur... To be clear I…

You may be misreading these numbers. It’s effectively 7-8% of the respondents who identify as non-heterosexual, which seems roughly in line with the general population (e.g. [0]). [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270166/lgbt-identificat...

That is assuming everyone who is one of those groups first sees themselves as marginalized. imo it would've been better to not have that first question and just ask people which group they identify with.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#828

Post by musicale »

lillecarl wrote: post #739
michaelt wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He needs to stop fighting with the winds he can't control. Users gonna be users, and people gonna be people. Everyone won't be happy, never ever. Right - but it kinda sounds like he's facing headwinds in a lot of different directions. Headwinds from Apple, who are indifferent to the project, stingy with documentation, and not inclined to reduce their own rate of change. Headwinds from users, because of the stripped…

Another uphill battle that I haven't seen anyone mention is just how good mobile AMD chips got a year or so after the M1 release. I wouldn't buy a Mac to run Linux on it when I can buy a Lenovo with equally soldered parts that'll work well with the OS I wanna run already.

The M1 reset expectations for laptop battery life and performance, and the result has been great for all platforms.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#829

Post by fastball »

dimator wrote: post #763
freetime2 wrote: post #692

> For a long time, well after we had a stable release, people kept claiming Asahi Linux and Fedora Asahi Remix in particular were “alpha” and “unstable” and “not suitable for a daily driver” This is still my position on Asahi Linux: that it is not something that I would use as a daily driver nor recommend to others for use as a daily driver. > “When is Thunderbolt coming?” “Asahi is useless to me until I can use moni…

i don't think anyone on the asahi team doesn't know that there are missing functionalities. if they're dealbreakers for anyone, fine. what's out of line is incessant reporting (via issues, emails, whatever) of what you consider a dealbreaker. that's my impression of what he's complaining about. let the people work. no one likes to respond "not yet" a billion times.

Is it incessant? I would expect the average Asahi Linux user to know how to search GitHub issues and just upvote a request for a certain feature. If many people are creating noise that isn't great, however understanding which functionalities people want most is helpful for deciding priorities.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#830

Post by OJFord »

Klonoar wrote: post #822
OJFord wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere really, it's just the phrase 'there's a thin [or fine] line between...' modified to say the police are that line, between lawful order & disorder. Apparently it's political in the US, I have no idea, but as I understand it the maintainer just means 'I am here reviewing the change to keep the kernel in good order'.

The maintainer might mean that, but words have meaning. That particular phrase is overly charged and carries a specific connotation surrounding the idea that police are the sole line keeping society in shape. It’s a poor choice of words for such (relatively) public communication.

These words have the meaning you're implying to at least some people in the USA, it was new to me.

I don't know his full biography, seems to be Chinese born and went to MIT, but he signs off 'Cheers', I think it's a reasonable possibility that he doesn't mean whatever politically charged US meaning it has by it.

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