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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#121

Post by mustache_kimono »

chongli wrote: post #68
bezier-curve wrote: post #4

I 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.

Brigading has no place in open source communities. There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel! The fact remains: Rust doesn’t solve all of C’s problems. It trades them off for a whole lot of new problems, many of which are challenging to addre…

> Brigading has no place in open source communities.

Agreed.

> There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel!

Would you care to share some examples of the Rust for Linux community who have said this? I'm unaware of Hector or anyone else saying anything similar? Or is this just a fear of yours?

I think we should be very clear -- believing the future of systems programming is mostly memory safe isn't the same thing as saying "C programmers should...get out of the way".

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#122

Post by satvikpendem »

fzeroracer wrote: post #106
satvikpendem wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's true, but those comments would be flagged too if they're bad enough. Just because a flagged comment exists does not mean the entire subthread is bad.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#123

Post by throwway120385 »

iamacyborg wrote: post #119
earnesti wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you pay for something, you’ve already demonstrated that you value whatever it is (a product, a service, etc). Free stuff tends to attract people who don’t value the thing.

There's also a level of professionalism depending on the product. When I'm responsible for an MSP team I'm very polite to them and always try to get them good, detailed, high-quality information when I'm telling them about problems with their work product, because I want them to do good work quickly and that's the best way to do that.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#124

Post by caspper69 »

kombine wrote: post #75
talldayo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As that kernel maintainer clearly stated this was not because the code was awful, but because the code was written in Rust and it was therefore cancer.

That's not what he said.

From the horse's mouth (lkml; Hellwig's headers chopped for brevity):

On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 02:17:24PM +0100, Danilo Krummrich wrote: > Since there hasn't been a reply so far, I assume that we're good with > maintaining the DMA Rust abstractions separately.

No, I'm not. This was an explicit:

Nacked-by: Christoph Hellwig

And I also do not want another maintainer. If you want to make Linux impossible to maintain due to a cross-language codebase do that in your driver so that you have to do it instead of spreading this cancer to core subsystems. (where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language codebase and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade).

---

Hellwig was abrasive and unreasonable. But there is no need to perpetuate, repeat, and repost absolutely one-sided, self-serving misrepresentations of the words he used.

You don't need to paraphrase. You don't need to guess. You don't need to distill or simplify.

He wrote English so we could read it; stop paraphrasing. It's unhelpful at best and nefarious at worst.

Edit: I think it's very telling that there is a crowd here that would literally downvote the actual quote. Actually it's more sad than anything.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#125

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

cogman10 wrote: post #30
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #9

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…

> 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)

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#126

Post by felipec »

bezier-curve wrote: post #4

I 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.

Linus didn't say he was the problem, he said he should consider that maybe he was the problem.

That's an invitation to self-reflection.

We all should consider that, in every discussion.

The opposite is to think that everyone who disagrees is by definition wrong, which can never be productive.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#127

Post by vinkelhake »

I'm sad to see this happen. I bought an M2 Air a year ago and I've been running Asahi on it since the day I got it. It hasn't been without hitches, but that was something I signed up for.

I'm incredibly grateful for all the work Hector and the others have done on this project. The Air is my dream hardware (I'm a sucker for sleek fanless laptops) and getting to run Linux on it is quite amazing.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#128

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

diggan wrote: post #115
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've been working on Ardour for 25 years now, and it took me 7-10 years to develop the right kind of skin for dealing with "user feedback". For me, the right kind of skin was basically to shed such stuff like water off a duck's back. Whether someone is saying "I've been using Logic for 10 years and this is so much easier and intuitive" or "You should be ashamed for asking anyone to pay for this steaming pile of…

Thank you for Ardour btw, great piece of software although I still use Ableton from time to time, Ardour is taking over more and more parts for me :) I've read your comments here (and elsewhere) for a long time, and I'm sure you'd have some great ideas or at least opinions about this, which is pretty relevant to what you just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537

I think my experience actually making a living from a FLOSS project changes things enough that it is not that relevant to people doing it "for the love it" or as a side-project.

It's much easier to shrug off strong comments when the people who do support you are making it possible for you (and one other) to lead a pretty comfortable middle class life.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#129

Post by yencabulator »

unethical_ban wrote: post #39

It sound like there are two major questions: Do the demigods of the Linux kernel - Linus and the core maintainers - personally want the kind of code Asahi is developing to be merged into the kernel? The author writes as if part of his drive was that Linus himself showed enthusiasm for getting Linux on Apple Silicon. If there is interest in the work Asahi has done, then the Linux team needs to describe what they see a…

And it sounds like you read just one side of the story, with no background in Linux kernel internals. This is about how C APIs are typically inherently unsafe, Rust people wanting to build safe(r) abstractions on top, and a question of who is responsible for changing what code when it's time to refactor the underlying C API. And yes, marcan is being overly dramatic, though he is not alone in that.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#130

Post by richrichardsson »

jeroenhd wrote: post #65
galoisscobi wrote: post #13

> 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…

> 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 statements about how easy it would be to fix/implement with the conviction that they are 100% correct, with a level of arrogance that is impossible to fathom how they could have written their email with a straight face.

The support requests we receive for a paid offering from the same company are 99% of time much more pleasant people (of course there are the, "I PAID FOR THIS YOU MUST FIX IT!!!1!" on occasions, but they're a definite minority).

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