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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

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Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#341

Post by ThatGuyRaion »

macintux wrote: post #331
ThatGuyRaion wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replied to another commenter about this, but these sorts of things are basically part and parcel of being a public figure. If you can't handle that, you need to sandbag. There's no other way around it. It is unlikely that Marcan will stop being the center of attention wherever he goes. If he wants to stand up for what he believes to be right, he shouldn't have a problem with the consequences of dealing with people…

> If he wants to stand up for what he believes to be right, he shouldn't have a problem with the consequences of dealing with people who disagree with him, sometimes virulently. This sounds like victim blaming. I suspect very few people who take a stand are truly prepared for years of abuse, even if they think they are. No one has perfect knowledge of the future.

It's not intended that way.

It's intended that you understand the consequences of your actions. If you're a primary order thinker who can't think past the first step then you got to be way more cautious with your life.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#342

Post by freehorse »

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…

I think entitlement like that is stupid and bad for open source (and everything). However, in the next paragraph the author gets into criticising the opposite position, that asahi linux was not ready for everyday use. The entitled requests came from users that thought of asahi linux as exactly covering an everyday use case, a linux distro they should be able to use to carry on their tasks. This I find contradictory. While some entitled users always exist, you can either admit that asahi is not a daily driver for people who want to use most of basic features of a laptop, or admit that the requests make sense. You cannot both claim that asahi is fine to be used, and complain that users ask for being able to connect an external monitor on a M1 macbook air. I am not sure what is wrong with the claim that asahi linux is an experimental (and no less amazing) project that people lacks certain (widely considered basic when things come to this) functionality, or that the functionality of it is restricted to these use cases that may include using it as a headless server but exclude some common other ones. I am not sure how this would matter, but setting user expectations to a level that matched the state of development may have helped to limit such requests.

I say that also because I have been gotten quite a few responses from people that I should use asahi, while looking at what it supports it definitely would not make sense for me, and you cannot just present it to a macos alternative right now.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#343

Post by josephg »

jstimpfle wrote: post #224
Certhas wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's practically impossible to document all your assumptions in the type system. Attempting to do so results in code that is harder to read and write. You have a choice between code that statically asserts all assumptions in the type system but doesn't exist, is slow, or a pain to work with, and code that is beautiful, obvious, performant, but does contain the occasional bug. I am not against static safety, but there…

> And types are often not the best way to achieve static safety.

That’s a sort of weird statement to make without reference to any particular programming language. Types are an amazing way to achieve static safety.

The question of how much safety you can reasonably achieve using types varies wildly between languages. C’s types are pretty useless for lots of reasons - like the fact that all C pointers are nullable. But moving from C to C++ to Rust to Haskell to ADA gives you ever more compile time expressivity. That type expressivity directly translates into reduced bug density. I’ve been writing rust for years, and I’m still blown away by how often my code works correctly the first time I run it. Yesterday the typescript compiler (technically esbuild) caught an infinite loop in my code at compile time. Wow!

I’d agree that every language has a sweet spot. Most languages let you do backflips in your code to get a little more control at compile time at the expense of readability. For example, C has an endless list of obscure __compiler_directives that do all sorts of things. Rust has types like NonZeroUsize - which seem like a good idea until you try it out. It’s a good idea, but the ergonomics are horrible.

But types can - and will - take you incredibly far. Structs are a large part of what separates C from assembler. And types are what separates rust from C. Like sum types. Just amazing.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#344

Post by kazinator »

> My personal Patreon will be paused, and those who supported me personally are encouraged to transfer their support

That seems silly; just assume people know about the change in circumstances and are trying to give you money for whatever you are doing at the moment, or in gratitude for what you've done before. The person exists, why pause the personal support?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#345

Post by sundarurfriend »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #31

> primarily due to the very large fraction of entitled users I think anyone working in serious open source projects just need to learn to ignore those users. I definitely would have the attitude of "I'm perfectly fine if no one uses my product" and have a lot of fun banning entitled users left and right.

That is why I absolute love the quote from FFmpeg maintainers towards a drive-by complainer:

Talk is cheap, send patches.

https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1762805900035686805

I see a lot of FOSS maintainers continue to engage and defend themselves against people who have demonstrated themselves as unwilling to contribute in any way, yet expecting that free work be done for them. I wish more open source devs will keep in mind that FOSS work is a gift they're sending out into the world, and it's a common good that anyone can contribute to. That is not to say ignore all criticism or user requests, just that you hold absolutely no responsibility to placate emotionally draining people - the project is just as much their responsibility as yours.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#346

Post by diggan »

radiospiel wrote: post #271
diggan wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false? Many discussions online (and offline) suffer from a huge-group of people who just can't stop themselves from making their knee-jerk reactions public, and then not thinking about it more. I remember the "Filesystem in Rust" video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s ) whe…

We have used that video as an exercise in how not to achieve change. Assuming everyone is acting in good faith, the presenter missed the opportunity to build consensus before the talk, Tsu unwilling to budge a bit, but most of all the moderator unable to prevent the situation from exploding. This could have been handled much better by each of them. In contrast to the parent: yes, the presenter says „you don’t have to…

> We have used that video as an exercise in how not to achieve change

I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, just curious who the "we" you're referring to here, are you a kernel developer or something similar?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#347

Post by purplesyringa »

School-Cotton wrote: post #234
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…

> Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug. This is a very persistent myth, but it’s wrong. Adding any public method to any impl can break BC (because its name might conflict with a user-defined method in a trait), and the Rust project adds methods to standard library impls all the time.

This is true, strictly speaking, but rarely causes problems. Inherent methods are prioritized over trait methods, so this only causes problems if two traits suddenly define a single method, and the method is invoked in an ambiguous context.

This is a rare situation, and std thrives to prevent it. For example, in [1], a certain trait method was called extend_one instead of push for this reason. Crater runs are also used to make sure the breakage is as rare as T-libs-api has expected. The Linux kernel in particular only uses core and not std, which makes this even more unlikely.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/72631

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#348

Post by sophacles »

School-Cotton wrote: post #234
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…

> Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug. This is a very persistent myth, but it’s wrong. Adding any public method to any impl can break BC (because its name might conflict with a user-defined method in a trait), and the Rust project adds methods to standard library impls all the time.

That's just not true. If the user has defined on the struct and a trait also has the method name, the struct's impl is used. Multiple traits can have methods named the same too.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#349

Post by kibwen »

judofyr wrote: post #263
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…

> "which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler implementation" - except that isn't true? Historically the Rust community has been extremely hostile towards gccrs. Many have claimed that the work would be detrimental to Rust as a language since it would split the language in two (despite gccrs constantly claiming they're not trying to do that). I'm not sure if it was an opinion shared by the core team, but if…

The LKML quote is alleging that the upstream language developers (as opposed to random users on Reddit) are opposed to the idea of multiple implementations, which is plainly false, as evidenced by the link to the official blog post celebrating gccrs. Ted T'so is speaking from ignorance here.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#350

Post by LocutusOfBorges »

selectnull wrote: post #233
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perspective is it might be a chicken-or-egg problem. I would willingly donate to the Asahi project...if/when I were to buy a Macbook for the purpose of running Asahi Linux on it. And I've been watching from the sidelines, waiting for Asahi Linux to become "stable" enough to consider buying a Macbook and putting Asahi Linux on it.

I was an early donator to marcan and never expected any delivery from Asahi project, just thought that the idea of having Linux of Apple Silicon was awesome and worthy of my support. But then marcan told his supportes to fuck off unless they commit to supporting his political ideas, which I was not willing to do. I guess this comment will be seen as abuse from the HN crowd. Oh well...

> But then marcan told his supportes to fuck off unless they commit to supporting his political ideas, which I was not willing to do.

Is this about Marcan’s outspoken support for transgender people? If so, why not simply say that in your comment, rather than framing it in such vague terms?

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