Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#771

Post by MattSayar »

bscphil wrote: post #751
lillecarl wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And some of these Lenovos are relatively upgradable too. I'm using a ThinkPad I bought refurbished (with a 2 year warranty) and upgraded myself to 40 GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD (there's another slot too if I need it). It cost me $350 including the part upgrades.

Where did you find a deal like that? Quick googling couldn't find it for me

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#772

Post by troad »

Lammy wrote: post #619
ecshafer wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust, which is a language I really enjoy, generates more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.

> 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…

> The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.

This is complete nonsense. We (LGBT) folk are pretty much equally represented in all programming communities. It's just that Rust presents as a very socially activist community, with all the attendant drama and culture war nonsense, including falsely claiming some sort of imprimatur from the LGBT folk to represent them. Cliquey hyper-online gays != the LGBT community.

Fortran, Erlang/OTP, any stack you can think of, will have LGBT devs. Common Lisp has some kickass trans devs. It's not a proliferation of rainbow flag emojis and obnoxious puerile cancel-culture politics that makes one community be 'more' LGBT than another. I won't stand for this kind of erasure of LGBT folk who don't take their assigned place in the culture war barricades.

Rust is a very neat language, but the biggest single barrier to its adoption is the Rust community, and I won't have them hijacking my identity to pretend some moral title to their constant - and deeply unpopular - online brigading, bullying, etc.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#773

Post by titmouse »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #285

I understand the challenges he's facing. But I think he put a bit too much of himself into the project. So everything is personal. When someone asks for functionality "why no thund3rb01t OmG" you should be able to say without taking it personally "driver will take time or a volunteer". > 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 atte…

PTSD seems a bit of a stretch in my (perhaps uneducated opinion), but he's definitely been under a pile of stress that he's internalizing more than he should be.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#774

Post by titmouse »

yoshuaw wrote: post #682
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.

> 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

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#775

Post by roenxi »

bayindirh wrote: post #194
e40 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also worth being aware of Robert Kagen's adult development model [0] or something similar; that gives people a framework to go from "humans seem" to some actual percentages and capabilities.

Spoiler, but approximately 66% of the adult population make do without being able to maintain their own perspective independently of what their social circle tells them it is. I imagine that would make it extremely challenging to determine what someone else's perspective is. Especially if that perspective is being formed based on empiricism rather than social signalling.

And if we're making book recommendations, Non-Violent Communication is a gem of an idea.

[0] https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th...

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#776

Post by o11c »

cornstalks wrote: post #257
cratermoon wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious now. What are the backwards compatibility guarantees for C?

As long as you compile with the version specified (e.g., `-std=c11`) I think backwards compatibility should be 100%. I've been able to compile codebases that are decades old with modern compilers with this.

C (and C++) code breaks all the time between toolchain versions (I say "toolchain" to include compiler, assembler, linker, libc, etc.). Some common concerns are: headers that include other headers, internal-but-public-looking names, macros that don't work the way people think they do, unusual function-argument combinations, ...

Decades-old codebases tend to work because the toolchain explicitly hard-codes support for the ways they make assumptions not provided by any standard.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#777

Post by sophacles »

rowanG077 wrote: post #509
bayindirh wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not by time, but by weight. The code you write is worthless if you can’t communicate it or what you did.

You are implying that if you can communicate but have nothing backing it up that's worth 95%? If anything code can still be taken as is and understood by someone else. So to me it's always most important to be able to produce anything before being able to communicate.

Once your proof of concept gains traction more time is spent in meetings with other teams responsible for the systems you'll be interacting with - making sure you do it "right" rather than scrappy. Once your initial release starts getting popular you spend more time looking at metrics and talking to operations folks to make scaling easier and not waste resources. Once your product starts having customers who depend on it, you spend a lot of time working with product to figure out features that make sense, advise on time estimates, mentor new team members, and advise teams who use your product/services as a dependency.

These are all engineering tasks, and the longer you spend on a team/in a company, the more likely it is you provide more value by doing this than by slinging code. You become a repository of institutional knowledge to dispense.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#778

Post by thombat »

pmontra wrote: post #164
duxup wrote: post #102

Earlier 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.

At Symbian defects were classified from P1-P4, with the inevitable shit-fights about adding magic runes to the title so everyone knows that your P1 is more important than theirs.

The day came when, after prolonged hand wringing and with stern observations about great power and great responsibility, the priority could be set to P0. But like any bunch of junkies we came off this new high all too quickly and the P-1 classification arrived, the showstopper of showstoppers.

In hindsight what I most regret is that we stuck with an integer field; we were denied the expressive power of fractionally critical issues.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#779

Post by timeon »

bmacho wrote: post #607
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…

> This sounds so rough. I can't imagine pouring your heart out into this labor of love and continue to have to face something like this. Or: he shouldn't steal people's time with false advertising :shrug: Also if he wants to create an operating system, then these aren't even requests, but bug reports. So the users ate his false advertising, spent time to try out his system, then spent some more time to file bug repor…

It is open-source no one is going to serve you or care for your time. Take it or leave it.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#780

Post by unrealhoang »

fransje26 wrote: post #507
ecshafer wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust, which is a language I really enjoy, generates more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.

It must be said that from an outsider's point a view, in quite a few aspects it very much sounds like a cult. Get an HN article about C++, and you can be certain the comment section is going to deteriorate at some point into a religious war mentioning Rust. Get an article about Rust, and there is going to be drama in the comments. As a programmer that could potential consider Rust, it is off-putting.

Get an article about Rust, and there’s going to be comments about how drama, zealous Rust is from people that never use Rust. Regardless of its content.

So yeah, typical internet houlier than thou reactions, I wouldn’t read much into them.

Post reply on HN