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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Related: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972062 New Apple Silicon Co-Maintainer Steps Up for the Linux Kernel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990588
• superkuh 2y ago
  It's a shame to see but inevitable when trying to get open software working on such a proprietary platform with so many hardware cut corners and incomplete/non-standard implementations. Just an insane amount of work of the most frustrating kind. What they did manage to do was incredible... but Apple is Apple.
  • Ygg2 2y ago
    This isn't an Apple issue. Maybe Linux on Apple is inherently more problematic, but the issue here came from Linux maintainers hostility towards Rust.
    • superkuh 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • Ygg2 2y ago
        > Did you read the article? Did you read the rest of it? Sure Apple being not as great to develop drivers, but ~99% of the article is about displeasure working with Linux maintainers. EDIT: Here is the breakdown by paragraphs. | Paragraph # | Tone | | ----------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | History recap | | 2 | History recap | | 3 | mentions Apple and M1 in positive light. | | 4 | Mostly positive, slight negative towards Apple not being having good docs. | | 5 | Negative Linux kernel development (upstreaming) | | 6 | Negative user focused | | 7 | Negative user focused, complaints about M3/M4 support. | | 8 | Negative user reviews | | 9 | Money troubles regarding support. | | 10 | Linux maintainers, mostly negative | | 11 | Unknown 2024 event | | 12 | Negative about users (demanding more features and support) | | 13 | Stress about Kernel development | | 14 | Negative about Linux kernel development roadblock | | 15 | Negative about Linux kernel development (Linus leadership failures) | | 16 | Positive about Rust | | 17 | Negative about Linux kernel development (Why Rust can't wait) | | 18 | Negative about Linux kernel development (downstreaming) | | 19 | Negative about Linux maintainer (thin blue line) | | 20 | Negative about Linux kernel maintainers (two faced) | | 21 | Negative about Linux kernel maintainers | | 22 | Negative about Linux (disapointment in refusing invitation) and Linus | | 23 | Negative about Linux maintainers (being corporate) | | 24 | Negative about Asahi, and dreading to turn on Apple | | 25 | Negative about burnout | | 26 | Resignation | | 27 | Positive about Asahi Linux team | | 28 | Hiring proposition. | 18 negative paragraphs 2 about Apple (11%) 4 about users (22%) 12 about Linux/Linus/Maintainers (67%) I was wrong about it being 99% about LKM but it's more accurate than saying 50% of issues are Apple.
        • superkuh 2y ago
          [flagged]
        • kittikitti 2y ago
          This is a beautiful and well done table. The exact formatting and the inclusion of extra statistics are appreciated.
          • Ygg2 2y ago
            Table formatting credit goes to Obsidian Text. I'm just surprised it worked so well with Google Drive copy-pasta.
        • superkuh 2y ago
          All those "Negative user focused" are actually "Apple proprietary problems" (problems that exist only on apple because of their weird proprietary stuff with no standards following, ie, getting temp on any other system is dead simple). Not sure if you actually believe in your list or you just used an AI that made the mistake. I counted paragraphs topics myself: History (3), Proprietary Hardware Problems (8), Kernel/Rust problems (8), Other/Quitting (7). Could be off by one or two because I'm not a machine. Also, I note that you did not disagree with or object to my initial response (the one made before your edit) that it is indeed halfway down the page before rust/kernel stuff is even mentioned. I think it is safe to say that both Apple and the kernel/rust issues matter here and trying to derail any discussion of Apple's role into even more rust ragebait threads in a HN topic full of them is counterproductive.
          • Ygg2 2y ago
            > All those "Negative user focused" No. Those are issues caused by users. You could have most open hardware platform, and it would still persist. See any OSS maintainer complaining about unrealistic user expectations. > I counted paragraphs topics myself: Proprietary Hardware Problems (8), Kernel/Rust problems (8) How are you counting those? I made a table, point me which exact paragraphs. Also it's deceptive to pull Rust into this story. marcan had nothing but praise for it, without it, he wouldn't be able to write those drivers. The main complaint of marcan is the horrible experience you have as a hobbyist Linux contributor. You can't blame Rust or Apple for that. That's on Linus, and Linux maintainers.
  • mattnewton 2y ago
    My sense from the article was that it seems less of an Apple is Apple issue, and more of a Linux maintainers are Linux maintainers issue. The big problems listed are all interpersonal conflicts and a sense that the maintainers were making his life upstreaming Rust changes hell.
• bezier-curve 2y ago
  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.
  • naasking 2y ago
    Maintaining the Linux kernel is all about gatekeeping. How else do you keep out bad code?
    • chpatrick 2y ago
      From what I've seen this is excellent code, some people just really don't like Rust.
      • Vilian 2y ago
        The last drama wasn't about the guy not liking drama, he just don't like nor want to maintain a codebase with two languages, but I think they really need to say it directly instead of calling it canser and leaving people to think he was calling rust cancer and not multiple languages codebase cancer
        • tcmart14 2y ago
          Im pretty sure he specifically said the cancer was trying to inter-op 2 languages in a code base and not Rust. Even went on to say that he thinks Rust is good and recommends people implement new Greenfield projects in it.
      • greenavocado 2y ago
        Aside from hatred of Rust and Rust developers there is a bigger problem. The Rust guys are twisting the C developers' arms to iron out API semantics because there is so much behavior and API usage that can't be defined in C and it's driving C devs insane. The Rust people are doing the right thing but doing the right thing is extremely annoying for the C devs.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• sphars 2y ago
  See also the response from the Asahi team: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
  • actionfromafar 2y ago
    "Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities."
    • talldayo 2y ago
      Funny how this aged, now. Trying to shame people on Mastodon? Totally valid. Trying to chew someone out on a private forum? Now it's an organized attempt to destroy lives.
      • timezone25mg 2y ago
        I notice this strange double standard also. "Everyone else is a bully, but not me - I'm just trying to raise awareness."
    • satvikpendem 2y ago
      Always funny to me to read something like that. HN has high moderation, one of the highest I've seen on modern fora, only a few steps below r/AskHistorians for example. I don't see this "abuse, bigotry, and nastiness" here and even if there are comments like that, they are quickly downvoted and dead.
      • actionfromafar 2y ago
        But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Octoth0rpe 2y ago
  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 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. I'd be surprised if the Asahi GPU work wasn't the largest problem by far that their team faces, and as such it would make sense to choose a kernel that lowers the difficulty on that aspect to the greatest degree possible.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    > 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 linux kernel. The android devs have put in a lot of effort to make downstream driver development not painful. With android, they'd also still have GNU stuff available. The big issue is non-linux will mean every single open source tool may have a compatibility problem. You also end up dumping a huge amount of capabilities (like running docker containers).
    • yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > 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)
      • cogman10 2y ago
        > 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.
• tekla 2y ago
  [flagged]
• jazzyjackson 2y ago
  God bless. Asahi introduced me to fedora/gnome, it feels rock solid on my m1 MacBook, and it's now my daily driver on a 2014 Intel Mac mini Wishing I had donated before, I'll sign up for opencollective now. I can only imagine the anticlimactic nature of releasing the emulation stack for gaming [0] and not seeing any increase in interest financially. One wonders what funding might have made it more worthwhile than simply passing the hat. [0] https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/ https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/
  • ycombinatornews 2y ago
    OT, Have you had any issues with WiFi setup with this Mac Mini? I tried multiple distributions and most of them have troubles with detecting WiFi chip on 2014 mini.
    • jazzyjackson 2y ago
      Oh that could be, I just have it hardwired. This machine was basically a dumpster dive and was sitting in my closet for the last few years til I found out it had USB3 and gigabit ethernet, did a SSD swap and its working great, but indeed I get "No Wi-Fi Adapter Found"
    • alienthrowaway 2y ago
      Debian 11 & 12 detect the wifi on 2014 Mac Minis. I had to enable the nonfree sources, IIRC
• galoisscobi 2y ago
  > 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 heart out into this labor of love and continue to have to face something like this. Back in the early days of Quora, when it used to be good, there used to be a be nice be respectful policy (they might still have it), I wonder if something like that would be helpful for open source community engagement. Regardless, major props to Marcan for doing the great work that he did, our community is lucky to have people like him!
  • prododev 2y ago
    This is every successful product, small, medium, large. I've never ever worked on a big corporate or small personal project and not experienced this. The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority". You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment you do your users become your opponent. None of those requests are entitled, the author has clearly already reached a point where they are antagonistic towards requests.
    • anonzzzies 2y ago
      Yes, this is pretty normal; in paid products I even find it's less aggressive than in free things. But I have a hard and frozen shell around my vital organs to just politely and friendly point to the place in queue and where to donate to speed it up. For $10k I will build your cpu temp proc, if that's not an option then it's in pos #17463 of my task list.
      • earnesti 2y ago
        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.
• aviat 2y ago
  "Hypothetically", what if after Linux and Git, Linus came up with his own memory safe language suited for kernel development?
  • Vilian 2y ago
    He likes C, hate c++, allowing rust in the kernel is trying something new, and maybe to attract new maintainers that don't care too much about C, and as he said "maybe it work, maybe don't, if don't we learn"
• oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
• vessenes 2y ago
  First of all, yay Asahi — one of the great modern hacking / hacker stories in my opinion. Second, what’s the drama? I read the blog, and I’m guessing that on top of being burned out, which sucks, 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. He then says he may have been toxic on Mastodon, which might have got him secretly canceled? All that said, I found his assessment of downstream v. upstream economics (if you can’t successfully upstream you’re doomed to rebase off a massive patch list) pretty interesting. I think the way it is now is the only way that’s good for users — if downstream forks could somehow maintain viability longer term, we would be splitting, e.g. security budgets, performance budgets, etc. I get that it sucks for a group working to upstream, and I am in no way shocked to hear personal politics plays some role in success upstreaming — open source is largely a personal / social capital economy - I guess all that said, hopefully the new Asahi maintainers can work well across what seems like ideology bounds. Maybe?
  • sharpshadow 2y ago
    Thank you for pointing out the blue line comment, I didn’t grasp it and continued. If you are right I’m saddened to see this type of politics being played in the kernel development. Especially since the Russian maintainer incident.
  • internet101010 2y ago
    My understanding from afar is that a Rust dev wanted to interact with C code in a way that the C maintainer didn't like. This led to the C dev saying that while he likes Rust, he believes multi-language codebases are cancer and would stonewall all Rust code that touches his code. Marcan watched it unfold on the mailing list wanted Linus to step in and force the C dev to play nice. Since nothing happened, he went to social media and lashed out as a last resort. That's when Linus finally chimed in and pretty much said "you might be right, but this isn't the way to handle things".
    • flykespice 2y ago
      > My understanding from afar is that a Rust dev wanted to interact with C code in a way that the C maintainer didn't like. He didn't want any Rust code at all touching his turf. He outright NACKed without any technical reason and refused any negotiations with the Rust team that any Rust build fails due to C code breaking changes would be their entire responsibility. > This led to the C dev saying that while he likes Rust, he believes multi-language codebases are cancer and would stonewall all Rust code that touches his code. I believe that was an attempt of damage control to save face and he actually meant to call Rust "cancer".
• Keyframe 2y ago
  Damn shame, both for the burnout and for the project. I was talking to the team which laptops next to get and kind of everyone wanted something like Arm with battery and performance and there are only MBPs (except damn notch) out there. Except no one wants MacOS. And then there's Asahi. I said it might come down to exactly this, what's happening now.
  • School-Cotton 2y ago
    Buying MacBooks and doing your development work in a full screen Linux VM (with e.g. UTM) is a surprisingly good solution, that’s what I’ve done for the past year with no regrets.
    • Keyframe 2y ago
      How's battery in such a case? Should still be on the great side, no?
      • School-Cotton 2y ago
        I don’t know whether it’s better or worse than using macOS by itself, but it sure feels better than any other laptop I’ve tried.
• alberth 2y ago
  I wonder how much of this is fueled by the economic model of Asahi. marcan had indicated donations are down, and it's hard to support ones livelihood just from donations alone - especially when they are down. https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/c5a49bcb-45cf-4295-80e0-c4b07083df00@marcan.st/ https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/c5a49bcb-45cf-4295-80...
  • tiahura 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
    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.
    • selectnull 2y ago
      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...
      • alberth 2y ago
        > But then marcan told his supportes to f* off unless they commit to supporting his political ideas As someone not in the know, would you mind elaborating.
        • selectnull 2y ago
          There is really not much to elaborate: I was supporting the idea of Linux on Apple Silicon. I would support that idea even today (without even installing it really) but because of marcan's twitter/mastodon (I don't remember which) posts. Btw, those accounts are on longer active, I presume marcan deleted them (go to marcan's About page and see for yourself). Now, if you want me to explain what political ideas those were: I don't care. Whatever they are, I don't want to support it, even if I have those same ideas. Yes, I do think that open source communities should move away from the politics.
• hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  > 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.
  • inahga 2y ago
    To me, unless there is an exchange of money and a signed statement of work, I have absolutely zero entitlement as a user. And the maintainers are well within their rights (by law and social contract) to tell me to go away. I wish this was a more adopted mindset. It’s why things like CentOS being abandoned, terraform licensing, et. al. never bothered me. I’m not paying them, so :shrug:.
  • shermantanktop 2y ago
    Easier said than done. If you care about users, and then realize most of them are jerks, it’s deflating. Maybe the secret is to not care about users, but the risk is that you end up doing self-gratifying work that leads nowhere.
    • hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
      Yeah, I agree. Maybe that's why I'm not doing great work -- I simply don't care about users. But again, you don't have to care about all users. You only need to care about the ones that have the same mindset. That's why I think working in smaller communities is better. Asahi Linux and Rust in Linux are the worst projects in that perspective because they both try to touch too many users. But again, maybe they can hire someone like me, whose sole job is to block the very worst entitled users.
    • 0dayz 2y ago
      Not exactly the same but being a mod made me realize the same, people will 100% treat you like a whole other being in a dehumanizing way, if you're just a passionate person about the topic you get whiplash at first.
  • deleted 2y ago
• thunkingdeep 2y ago
  [dead]
• IshKebab 2y ago
  Well written. I think the accusations of drama-hunting are unfounded. What else are you supposed to do in the face of persistent "non-technical nonsense"? Linus doesn't seem to care. Definitely a shame. I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac. It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them.
  • talldayo 2y ago
    > I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac Trust me, we would know by now if it was. It's not.
    • IshKebab 2y ago
      Things don't happen instantly. You could have doubted it was in Microsoft's interest to support Linux within Windows for years... until they released WSL.
      • talldayo 2y ago
        Windows machines already support Linux on the hardware level. Getting an Intel or AMD CPU to virtualize a Linux kernel is simple. Worst case scenario is an Nvidia GPU, but since you only need the compute drivers in WSL you avoid Nvidia's graphical issues. There isn't any work required since the OEMs already did it, the only thing required is Hyper-V. Apple is selling a custom CPU core that has no driver support for anything but XNU with a BSD userland. It doesn't support UEFI, it depends on Devicetree bindings and would demand constant updating and support to render a "first class" Linux experience. Once again, anyone with a protracted interest in staying supported by upstream Linux should not be using a Mac and praying the community cares enough to make it good. Apple knows it's a novelty, and they're not going to take it seriously because that's just what they do. MacOS and the App Store is profitable, Linux is not.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • 2y ago
• unethical_ban 2y ago
  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 as the gap between today's code quality and support model and what they want to see before upstreaming. It sounds like the Linux team has been wishy-washy and needs to draw a line in the sand on their needs rather than handwaving about being part of the "community". It would be fair to say "we don't like your attitude or trust you to work with us kindly over the years and don't want to deal with you", if that's the case. Just don't dance around it.
  • yencabulator 2y ago
    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.
    • unethical_ban 2y ago
      I do not claim a background in Linux kernel internals. I'm a human who has seen teams miscommunicate in the past, and see it now. I'm not sure what I said that drew hostility. It sounds like you agree with me though. The Linux team needs to clearly define the expectation they have for code maintenance from the team trying to upstream Rust code (edit) and the Asahi team needs to acknowledge how/if they can meet those expectations.
      • yencabulator 2y ago
        Well, stop accusing people who's work you don't know of being wishy-washy. The challenge is not dictating from high above some criteria; the challenge is discovering the criteria that will let the Linux project continue development as well as can be arranged. This is why you'll hear Linus say it's a learning experience, and not just make proclamation of how things shall be (at this stage).
• anoncow 2y ago
  Good job and thank you for doing doing what you do.
• shortformblog 2y ago
  As a 20-year Mac enthusiast who knew a thing or two about Hackintoshing, Marcan got me excited about Linux. The idea that someone could just say, “we can solve this difficult problem and make it work, with little external help”? That is the core of FOSS right there, and he helped so much work happen, so quickly. Loved following his various social feeds. I was sad when he stepped away from the fediverse. I hope he comes back as just a regular hacker without this massive weight on his back.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• erwincoumans 2y ago
  Thank you Macan! Asahi is a heroic effort, but way larger than a hobby. To be sustainable, it would require full buy-in from Linus and kernel maintainers indeed. Hope you enjoy well deserved better hobbies and family time.
• LucidLynx 2y ago
  Unfortunately it is not the first time a good developer leaves the project for a famous "Linu(s)x shitshow", and it will not be the latest... I don't believe in the Linux project since a few years now, especially as "the bearded ones" are not interested in moving the project to a certain future, but only jerking on their old own code. Good luck for the futur Hector, and thanks for what you managed to do until now with your team.
  • Avamander 2y ago
    > I don't believe in the Linux project since a few years now, especially as "the bearded ones" are not interested in moving the project to a certain future, but only jerking on their old own code. I personally lost my confidence in it when they stopped properly triaging security issues and flooded everyone interested with just noise.
• dagmx 2y ago
  I really feel for Hector. Open source can be brutal, especially with larger and well established projects. I contribute to several projects as a well recognized person in my field, not at their scale, but everything they say rings true. Established developers often push back extremely hard on anything new, until and unless it aligns with their current goals. I’ve had maintainers shut me down without hearing out the merits, only to come back a year later when whatever company they work for suddenly sees it as important. Project leads who will shift goalposts to avoid confronting the clear hostility their deputies show. I’ve had OSS users call me personal number, or harass me over email for not having their pet interest prioritized over everything else. Often that’s because I’m blocked by the maintainers. Open source can be extremely brutal and it’s a battle of stamina and politics as much as it’s one of technical merit.
  • SXX 2y ago
    This is not something specific to open source. Unfortunately if you want to be well-known person who works on well-known project you must either ignore all the shit thrown at you altogether or you must be very very resilient. When you react to attacks on internet you will be attacked, often. And while I appreciate Marcan's work a lot he is also partically responsible because he himself often jumped on bandwagon attacking other people exactly the same way.
    • dagmx 2y ago
      There’s a significant difference between open source and proprietary software. With proprietary software you usually have a corporate mandate, a goal etc to achieve. Any new tech is achieved as part of that drive. You can get people on board or not based on that, and once you’ve decided, there is someone to answer to if you can’t deliver. Open source doesn’t have that. A project can go in twenty different directions at once, you can say you all agree to something and then have people sabotage it without being answerable to anyone. Does that make open source worse? No. It’s the trade off for being open, which is extremely valuable but it is a very different push in terms of a product.
      • 2y ago
• Mizza 2y ago
  Marcan is a legend, it's a shame it ended like this. The communities around certain software technologies can act incredibly hostile and entitled towards developers, paradoxically even more so for free and open source projects. I've seen this many times happen in audio production and game emulation software. But Marcan clearly has true hacker spirit, I'd wager we'll see him again in the future with an equally cool project. It's often best if the visionaries just spend their efforts to get the ball rolling and then let the project evolve on it's own as they move onto their next challenge.
  • codr7 2y ago
    Starting social media shame wars over minor disagreements isn't exactly what I would call hacker spirit, but whatever.
    • mschuster91 2y ago
      Hard to call what's going on a "minor disagreement" though. And that's the problem - some people just stonewall and the leadership refuses to do anything about it.
      • codr7 2y ago
        Still doesn't justify the reaction, nothing does.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
• tylerchilds 2y ago
  i think at this point, the only path forward for rust and linux is a hard fork Rinux
  • ThatGuyRaion 2y ago
    The name is kind of ridiculous though. Sounds like a misspelling by East Asians, so nah, it'd have to be named something different. Otherwise people are going to get accusations that it's a South Park thing.
    • tylerchilds 2y ago
      Runix
• dark-star 2y ago
  Trying to push Rust code into Linux and after a year calling it a "failure of leadership" when people are reluctant don't welcome your code with open arms is not very professional. It has taken other projects decades of out-of-tree maintenance until their code finally got in (RTLinux). The correct way would have been to maintain the Rust code out-of-tree, for as long as it would take, which would also somewhat prove that you are ready to maintain that code over a longer time period. Sad that this led to him stepping down, but maybe others in the Asahi Linux circle are ready to keep maintaining the code out-of-tree until everyone is ready for it
  • ThatGuyRaion 2y ago
    I checked into Reiser4 and they are still indeed working on that out of tree. Hats off to people who stick to it, though I think renaming the file system would have been a smart idea. That's the only other project I can think of that's out of tree besides the usual suspect (ZoL)
• walterbell 2y ago
  Was any of the Corellium port [1] usable for mainline Linux? In theory, they have a commercial interest in Linux for Apple Silicon, plus emulation tools. [1] https://www.corellium.com/blog/linux-m1 https://www.corellium.com/blog/linux-m1
  • shortformblog 2y ago
    I actually helped with some of the beta testing for it. They worked on it very early on in the Apple silicon Mac lifecycle, and it hasn’t been updated in nearly half a decade. I consider it a proof of concept. https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1 https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1
• firesteelrain 2y ago
  Staying away from the emotional part of this blog post. I was about to write a question to ask why, if these downstreams are forked, that it is such a big deal to be gatekeeping the upstream and I think I got my answer from this: "In fact, the Linux kernel development model is (perhaps paradoxically) designed to encourage upstreaming and punish downstream forks. While it is possible to just not care about upstream and maintain an outright hard fork, this is not a viable long-term solution (that’s how you get vendor Android kernel trees that die off in 2 years). The Asahi Linux downstream tree is continuously rebased on top of the latest upstream kernel, and that means that every extra patch we carry downstream increases our maintenance workload, sometimes significantly. " Is it wrong for Linus to take the side of the kernel and not of the various distros? Serious question. I don't completely understand all of the background here. "But it goes deeper than that: Kernel/Mesa policy states that upstream Mesa support for a GPU driver cannot be merged and enabled until the kernel side is ready for merge. This means that we also have to ship a Mesa fork to users. While our GPU driver is 99% upstreamed into Mesa, it is intentionally hard-disabled and we are not allowed to submit a change that would enable it until the kernel side lands. This, in practice, means that users cannot have GPU acceleration work together with container technologies (such as Docker/Podman, but also including things like Waydroid), since standard container images will ship upstream Mesa builds, which would not be compatible. We have a partial workaround for Flatpak, but all other container systems are out of luck. Due to all this and more, the difficulty of upstreaming to the Linux kernel is hurting our downstream users today." I think we are dealing with a maintenance problem of downstream forks and trying to make their lives easier by convincing the kernel maintainers to accept the changes upstream. Does Linux have a standards committee or some sort of design committee? I thought they had something to decide what goes in and what doesn't. If it doesn't then is it necessarily gatekeeping then? It seems like someone has to make the hard technical choices whether something becomes part of Linux or not and that is what Linus is doing. I am trying to understand the real issue here. It seems like the difficulty in upstreaming changes to help the downstream folks is the issue not necessarily that the downstream folks are blocked.
  • dralley 2y ago
    >Is it wrong for Linus to take the side of the kernel and not of the various distros? Serious question. I don't completely understand all of the background here. Linus is pro-R4L. He wants to see Rust drivers in the kernel upstream, and has expressed frustration that it has been such a slow process, and that he doesn't understand why some maintainers turn it into a religious issue. The problem is that he hasn't done much in the way of actually standing up against arbitrary stonewalling by those maintainers. This ensures that everyone gets pissed off and creates a giant mess of arguments. Rust people get pissed off because they were told their contributions were welcome and feel like their time investment is being wasted on bullshit, and C maintainers because the lack of a clear policy leads to ruminating and imaginations running wild.
• nindalf 2y ago
  Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o (https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.edu/ 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 after that. They have maximum leverage at review time, and 0 leverage after. It also makes sense to relax that attitude for someone in the old boys' network because you know they'll help maintain it in the future. So far so good. A really good look into his perspective. And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false? - "an upstream language community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility guarantees" -> Rust has a stability guarantee since 1.0 in 2015. Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug. - "which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler implementation" - except that isn't true? Here's the maintainer on the gccrs project (a second Rust compiler implementation), posting on the official Rust Blog -> "The amount of help we have received from Rust folks is great, and we think gccrs can be an interesting project for a wide range of users." (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-compiler-for-rust.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-c...) This is par for the course I guess, and what exhausts folks like marcan. I wouldn't want to work with someone like Ted Tso'o, who clearly has a penchant for flame wars and isn't interested in being truthful.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • Certhas 2y ago
    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@gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240828211117.9422-1-wedsonaf@... which references this fantastic exchange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s 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 and then (and for the drama). But this exchange is really stunning to me. It seems so blatantly obvious to me that systematically documenting (in code!) and automatically checking semantic information that is required to correctly use an API is a massive win. But I have encountered this type of resistance (by very smart developers building large systems) in my own much smaller and more trivial context. To some degree, the approach seems to be: "If I never write down what I mean precisely, I won't have to explain why I changed things." A more charitable reading of the resistance is: Adding a new place where the semantics are written down (code, documentation and now type system) gives one more way in which they can be out of sync or subtly inconsistent or overly restrictive. But yeah, my intuitive reaction to the snippet above is just incredulity at the extreme resistance to precisely encoding your assumptions.
• t43562 2y ago
  In an effort like Linux it's difficult for everyone to have their way - there are many "ways" but only one kernel. I have had to do maintenance on a distributed filesystem driver at one point. This was outside the kernel. I can see why no kernel maintainer would have wanted to look after it even if it was open sourced because the file server was a mixture of C++ and an interpreted language and working out if you'd broken the driver somehow was a miserable job. You would need obscure expertise to understand it all. Anyone with a good idea can still fork Linux. If their idea is so great it may end up that their branch gets adopted - if they bother to maintain it.
• thw8419 2y ago
  The Rust situation was handled badly. Two languages (one of which has panics and all sorts of version issues) in one kernel are clearly not viable. Linus should have put his foot down and mandated C instead of stringing people along. That of course was difficult in the corporate environment of 2014-2024. Perhaps he was forced to do it. In many areas, sanity has returned, so perhaps we can get clearer messaging again in the future.
  • xyzsparetimexyz 2y ago
    Plenty of people disagree with your rust take. Are you a Linux maintainer?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • popcalc 2y ago
      It's obvious many are seething at this news. People, please try to practice healthy coping techniques.
  • rat87 2y ago
    > That of course was difficult in the corporate environment of 2014-2024. No clue what you could mean by this >Perhaps he was forced to do it. By whom? Linus is the one who decides these things.
    • popcalc 2y ago
      The court of public opinion possibly.
    • rust41percent 2y ago
      [dead]
• dcchambers 2y ago
  I have no dog in the Rust-for-Linux fight, but it seems fairly obvious that is the major reason for the burnout here. The financial situation sucks. I just threw a small donation their way but funding a project of this scale just from end users is rarely a viable long-term solution...feel like they need to find some high level corporate sponsors. My best to Hector, what he managed to pull off with the other Asahi developers is remarkable.
• silisili 2y ago
  Hector, I know you deleted your account here but in the off chance you browse by - thank you for all of your hard work and knowledge sharing on this over the years. Hope you find time to take a long well deserved 'mental health break' and destress.
  • adultSwim 2y ago
    I second the motion. So many of us are deeply thankful for this tremendous work.
  • neop1x 2y ago
    Yes, I second that! Thank you for the unbelievable amount of work you did. I would have never thought that it was even possible to do without vendor support. You made history, and it won't be forgotten or disappear. Now, please take a rest and enjoy life and other hobbies. I wish you the best!
• diggan 2y ago
  I don't think it's the first time, nor the last, we'll see maintainers and otherwise really great people being turned off from FOSS because of the massive weight that entitled outsiders and toxic "collaborators" seem to add. So on that, is there any guides for FOSS maintainers out there about how to deal with the emotional toll of FOSS, with a focus on self-care, how to say "No", generally just how to deal with the people/human part of FOSS, without focusing on the technical details? We have a ton of guides from companies and individuals how to make the technical, infrastructure, product, software parts work, but I don't remember ever seeing a guide how to deal with emotions one might feel when doing this sort of work. I think I'm lucky that it's relatively easy for me to tell people to fuck off when I find them not contributing or being toxic, but judging by the amount of people who feel a real emotional toll, border-lining to the feelings of burnout while working on their dream projects, this doesn't seem to come as easily to everyone, so having a guide/manual about this would be amazing.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • detuur 2y ago
    I have a few projects that I've abandoned because they only made sense as a FOSS project, and I saw how FOSS maintainers were being treated. I love FOSS, I love the philosophy, and I would love to "give back" one day by making the ecosystem richer, but I've not yet found a project that I love enough to be abused over.
• pmarreck 2y ago
  Drama needs to be worked against, not expanded upon. A lot of what I’m reading seems to make me feel that drama was… not avoided by this person, putting it charitably. And I'm someone who I believe still sponsors them! Asahi Linux is an awesome, and dare I say necessary, project. There is value in learning how to relinquish a constant "defensive posture" mentally. (I have struggled with, and am still working through this, personally, btw.) Heading a project like this surely challenges everyone's stoicism, though.
  • busterarm 2y ago
    Agreed. There's such a victim mentality throughout this post. While it's clear that marcan faced into headwinds, they're also definitely not somebody that I want to be around me in any kind of leadership position.
    • ChocolateGod 2y ago
      If you're trying to convince people to do things, certainly don't shit talk them on social media (even if you think it's true).
    • Den_VR 2y ago
      Can’t say I’d want you on the team characterizing a situation like this, and communicating about a situation like this, as “victim mentality.” There’s a lot of toxic behaviors that have wormed their way into certain parts of culture. I’m not as concerned about bright, brash men like Hector.
      • busterarm 2y ago
        You're not concerned about somebody who incites the internet hate mob against you when they don't get their way in a technical/leadership disagreement? The amount of drama that this has created for Linux when the entire situation was being handled in a non-dramatic way is staggering. At its root, nothing about the entire situation had anything to do with marcan anyway and yet somehow he has focused an enormous amount of attention on himself and negative opinions at those he disagreed with. He habitually does things that draw attention to himself (in situations that aren't about him specifically) and then points to _any_ form of criticism he receives and cries harassment. Of course anyone reasonable would never want to work with him.
• akudha 2y ago
  One thing that I notice often - people just do not take 5 minutes to appreciate someone or send 5 dollars to a project that they use daily etc. Not just in the software world, but life in general. Someone I know works full time, takes care of her two kids, takes care of her husband. Kids are almost teens now, but she gets zero support from them or her husband. Or even an occasional thanks. I see this everywhere, this is just one example. Are we so busy or egoistic or ignorant that we can't stop and say thanks? What is even more worse is the entitlement. People who wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone (even their own families) are usually the loudest and the most entitled ones. I don't know if this is the case around the world (probably is?) and I don't know what the solution is. It just sucks
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • chaorace 2y ago
    > Kids are almost teens now, but she gets zero support from them or her husband This is a good analogy. Children are the people who they've been raised to become, so it stands to reason that people will give money and appreciation in the same ways that these things are originally given to them. These things are social constructs; we are inevitably taught how to use them by way of social dynamics. This is all to say that people love to support their darlings... but they've been socially conditioned to expect reciprocity in all transactions. That's how the sausage is made in content-based monetization -- you produce the actual product at a loss and then try to claw it back selling high-margin merchandise that nobody'd ever buy otherwise. The merch acts as social permission to finally do your part and pay the creators. To risk stating the obvious: this is not a good thing and I think the majority of people would likewise agree. People should be fairly rewarded for their work and we should desire a culture which openly and freely encourages doing so. Culture, however, reflects society. The society we've created is transactional, so that's how people frame the spending of their money and efforts -- indeed, "spending" and "transaction" are practically interchangeable in our collective lexicon. Effort isn't strictly scarce in the same way eggs are, however, so we fail to value it. > I don't know if this is the case around the world (probably is?) and I don't know what the solution is. It just sucks It's not a total disaster... so we'll undoubtedly continue to ignore the cracks in the foundation. Martin still got paid good money for his efforts and it was good for him for a time. That podcast you like will sell enough t-shirts and get the rent paid on time, at least for a little while longer. This seems to be about as good as we've collectively agreed to make the world for the time being. A local maxima, so to speak: we've gotten stuck asking for more when less might do better. With a bit of luck and effort, however, we can still catch that pendulum when it eventually begins swinging in the other direction. That's my hope, anyway! For the time being I try to do the things I'd like to see become normal in a more decent world -- sharing generously, paying for the things I like, etc. -- because hopeless accelerationism is for chumps.
• weinzierl 2y ago
  Reading this I cannot help thinking about what Linus Torvalds said more than 20 years ago[1] in an interview. When asked if he feared competition for Linux his answer was that few liked writing device drivers and as long as no one "young and hungry" came along that could write device drivers and liked it he'd be safe. There you have him, Hector Martin, young[2] and hungry and loves writing drivers. No surprise he clashes with the old guard. [1] I don't remember the date but it was still on analog TV, so definitely more than 20 years. [2] At least a different generation from Linus and could easily be his son. Young enough for generational conflict at any rate.
  • dmix 2y ago
    They aren't competing with Linux though.
    • CRConrad 2y ago
      But maybe they should be.
  • fluoridation 2y ago
    But this conflict isn't about competing with Linux, it's about having a vision for what Linux should be that clashes with the core maintainers' vision.
• vinkelhake 2y ago
  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.
• 999900000999 2y ago
  A few questions. First, maybe Linux just is bound to always be a C only project. Linus Torvalds infamously dislikes C++, its sorta odd he didn't shut down Rust for Linux in the first place. Redox is on its way... Second, there are multiple types of compensation. I think the author was probably looking to be compensated in validation from others. Maybe if Linus Torvalds, replied to his email the author would be more inclined to continue. However, I can't be mad at someone for deciding how they want to spend their time. You only have so many hours in the day. Would be cool if Qualcomm hired Marcan and worked with an OEM to roll out a series of Arm Linux laptops. That's what we ultimately want.
  • School-Cotton 2y ago
    Why does disliking C++ make it odd that he is open to Rust? C++ is uniquely bad; disliking it doesn’t necessarily mean you only like C.
    • 999900000999 2y ago
      At this point you have a community of maintainers who expect it to remain a C project. Which is very logical. If you add Rust, why not Zig, Nim, and every other low level language?
      • legobmw99 2y ago
        I can't find the exact link now (very well might have been a video without a searchable transcript), but I recall someone asking Linus that (specifically re his previous comments on C++), and his answer was something like he saw Rust solving a problem that C genuinely does not. It's controversial, but I do think of C++, Zig, etc as solving the "same problems" as C (perhaps in a much nicer way)
        • 999900000999 2y ago
          His particular opinion doesn't matter if the rest of the old guard only wants C in the kernel. A lot of pain and drama could of been prevented if he put his foot down and said only C code is allowed. Instead he left it ambiguous, and a lot of good meaning people have been damaged by this. I know I'd be upset if I had been a part of the Rust for Linux team, and when I actually wanted to get my code in I was told my contributions weren't welcomed. I wouldn't want to mix and match languages in a project that's so vital to really the entire world. It just seems like a good way for a funky rust bug to cause billions in issues...
• gsck 2y ago
  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 patches and drivers for their own hardware, at least then you know there is a vested interest in supporting the hardware from the people who know it better than anyone else and have the means to continue supporting it. I applaud Hector and everyone else that contributes to Asahi, its genuinely a cool project and the progress they have made is insanely impressive given the lack of any official documentation about the hardware they are working on, but its one of these things that will remain in the realm of a cool curiosity much like running Linux on a games console.
  • __turbobrew__ 2y ago
    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.
    • mschuster91 2y ago
      > 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. Apple explicitly chose to provide a way to boot third-party operating systems when designing how the M-series SoC boots. Their SoC stuff dates in some components AFAIK back to the very first iPod SoCs in its design. I would understand that attitude if someone wished to, say, upstream code for PlayStations or other game consoles because that is a bunch of fights waiting to happen, but Apple hasn't made any move directly against FOSS OSes on their computers in the past and there is no reason to believe that will change.
• lenova 2y ago
  This part of the post is being overlooked: Then 2024 happened. Last year was incredibly tumultuous for me due to personal reasons which I won’t go into detail about. Suffice it to say, I ended up traveling for most of the year, all the while having to handle various abusers and stalkers who harassed and attacked me and my family (and continue to do so). This is _not_ ok in any form, what the actual hell?
  • sharpshadow 2y ago
    Absolutely not okay and I somehow hope it hadn’t todo with Asahi Linux.
  • xyzsparetimexyz 2y ago
    It's hard to know what he exactly means by this. It sounds pretty bad but this guy does seem to attract and develop a fair bit of drama and this could be a bit exaggerated from the truth.
    • milesrout 2y ago
      It very likely is. By "abusers" he likely means "people that are rude to him online" and by "stalkers" the same. Nobody is following him around IRL. He probably is referring mainly to the Kiwifarms people that get a kick out of documenting the downwards spiral of someone like Hector.
      • 0dayz 2y ago
        No need to speculate until you know for sure. Unless he got an extensive posting online on social media platforms I doubt he would garner much attention.
      • antidumbass 2y ago
        For clarity, it isn't that. He's referring to a single specific person who engaged in stalking and personally harassing behavior unrelated to the projects. The receipts are all over, you can find them if you insist.
  • 2y ago
• jisnsm 2y ago
  If Marcan (Hector Martin) is serious about quitting Linux development, he will stop contributing to the project using his Asahi Lina persona as well. Until then this is just empty posturing trying to elicit a reaction from the community.
  • gjsman-1000 2y ago
    For anyone who complains, everyone knows. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35234480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35234480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32947939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32947939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37550189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37550189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231241
  • bakugo 2y ago
    Is he really still pretending that his vtuber persona is a different person? That makes this way more of an embarrassing attention-grab than it already was.
    • rvz 2y ago
      Yes. He is not fooling anyone else. We all know that marcan is Asahi Lina. Out of the links that one other person posted in the replies, these are the most convincing and the most damning to conclude this. [0] [1] [2] [3] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37550189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37550189 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041525
  • zahlman 2y ago
• imiric 2y ago
  This is unfortunate, but before pointing fingers, it's worth putting things into perspective. The linked "thin blue line" message[1] also says this: > One of the things which gets very frustrating from the maintainer's perspective is development teams that are only interested in their pet feature, and we know, through very bitter experience, that 95+% of the time, once the code is accepted, the engineers which contribute the code will disappear, never to be seen again. As a result, a very common dynamic is that maintainers will exercise the one and only power which they have --- which is to refuse to accept code until it is pretty much perfect --- since once we accept the code, we instantly lose all leverge, and the contributors will be disappear, and we will be left with the responsibility of cleanig up the mess. (And once there are users, we can't even rip out the code, since that would be a user-visible regression.) Which seems very reasonable. Maintainers shouldn't be expected to support a feature indefinitely just because a 3rd party is interested in upstreaming it. In the case of Rust for Linux and the Asahi project specifically, I imagine this would entail a much larger effort than any other contribution. So just based on this alone, the bar for entry for Asahi-related features should be much higher. Perhaps this is ultimately a failure of leadership as TFA claims, but it would be foolish to blame the Linux maintainers or its development process, and take sides either way. Maybe what Asahi is trying to accomplish just isn't a good fit for mainline Linux, and they would be better served by maintaining a hard fork, or developing their own kernel. [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.edu/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed...
  • arp242 2y ago
    I don't really follow what's objectionable about Ted's email, or why it's being singled out. It matches my experience as an open source maintainer pretty accurately. It's also pretty constructive (it goes on to lay out a plan on how to constructively proceed and make everyone happy).
    • o11c 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • 2y ago
• seigel 2y ago
  Thank you for your efforts. Unfortunately people are people and the loudest are usually the complainers. I wish we, your supporters, were able to muster as loud of applause when the complaints come in, but we are too busy enjoying your work. Thank you again. Sidenote: thank you also to all those project leads that put themselves out there. Not easy being the $h1t magnet. <3
• soygem 2y ago
  [flagged]
• qiqitori 2y ago
  "we were still stuck without DP Alt Mode (a feature which required deep reverse engineering, debugging, and kernel surgery to pull off, and which, if it were to be implemented properly and robustly, would require a major refactor of certain kernel subsystems or perhaps even the introduction of an entirely new subsystem)." Few maintainers care about the platform in question (to whom it's more a curiosity like maybe 68k), and don't have the hardware to test any submitted patches. It's painful to have to accept code that you can't test (though it may be common in certain parts of the kernel). It's painful to see a bunch of changes for just one random feature on a random platform. It's unclear how the code will affect other platforms, etc. Now throw in some controversial stuff. The vendor of the platform is Apple and some patches are written in Rust... oh em gee!
  • philistine 2y ago
    Are you saying that PCs do not usually have the ability to plug into a monitor, to charge, and to connect to a USB hub for the rest of your devices from a single USB-C port? You guys still plug three cables each time you sit at a desk?
    • talldayo 2y ago
      When was the last time you touched a PC, 2003? They most certainly do, when the OEM actually supports it: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/thunderbolt.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/thunderbo... It's not ever coming to Apple Silicon on Linux since post-Thunderspy, Thunderbolt is dangerous to implement even in the best of circumstances. You'd have to reverse-engineer and update Apple's IOMMU, write software drivers for the port since it doesn't have firmware and test it across a variety of vulnerable devices to see how secure it is.
      • philistine 2y ago
        > when the OEM actually supports it that sentence carries a lot of weight. How many millions of users are left in the dust? Last time I touched a PC, the USB-C port could charge the laptop, unless the battery was empty. Then only the barrel plug could be used. It. was. infuriating.
• keyme 2y ago
  Perhaps it is no longer realistic to push such a huge changeset into linux anymore. Could this be solved with some hypervisor layer? That is, a hypervisor doing most of the work (in rust) and a small support layer upstreamed into the kernel? Of course, no actual virtualization is even necessary. Just some kind of ABI to the kernel running underneath.
  • gpm 2y ago
    There was a proposal to do something like what you suggest in redox: https://www.redox-os.org/news/rsoc-2023-eny-1/ https://www.redox-os.org/news/rsoc-2023-eny-1/ I'm not sure how much work has actually been put into it though.
• gtirloni 2y ago
  Two HUGE roadblocks were self-inflicted: adopting a hardware platform that doesn't care about external development (Apple silicon) and a programming language that has almost zero support in the Linux kernel (being the first ever to try to achieve multilanguage Linux kernel development). The odds were set against the Asahi Linux project from the beginning.
  • macNchz 2y ago
    Totally—on the hardware platform piece, I've owned Macs since the 90s, first installed Linux on one in like 2003ish, tried it on all of my various Macs since at some point, but switched to a desktop Linux machine full time in 2020. I'm generally not one to crap on ambition, but Linux is just so much more enjoyable on hardware that isn't totally closed/undocumented/hostile/unsupported by the manufacturer. With the Macs there was just always something slightly unsupported, regularly broken by updates, or otherwise not quite right, and that was before the architecture switch. Apple makes great hardware (I have an M1 laptop I use away from home), but if I'm intending to run Linux as my primary OS, I'm buying from a company that is more open to it.
• ThatGuyRaion 2y ago
  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 and didn't provide much in the way of actual community details because I went to the FBI and local police to deal with it. And yes a few people not only got no contact orders, but lost jobs, families, and more over their exposure. Marcan is extremely talented, but talent doesn't equal "I get to get my way." All the time. This idea that conflicts need to be resolved quickly and in the favor of a golden boy is a millennial/zoomer issue.
  • secondcoming 2y ago
    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.
    • ThatGuyRaion 2y ago
      And getting emotionally involved. As Johnny Knoxville said: when you get emotional you become irrational and when you become irrational everything is real to you
  • stirlo 2y ago
    I don't doubt him about the stalking problem (by online trolls, not necessarily IRL). He was a prominent voice in the trans supporter community and was regularly attacked by Kiwifarms.
    • ThatGuyRaion 2y ago
      Well, if anyone broke the law or harmed him he needs to go to law enforcement or the FBI. Outside of that, just get used to be thrown abuse of all kinds. If you get tagged by a group like that the more you talk about them the more you give them ammo.
• thesid 2y ago
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• thehias 2y ago
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  • stirlo 2y ago
    >M2 upbringing was like 10 hours onstream, M3/M4 would not take any longer. You have NFI what you're talking about. There were major architectural changes in M series chips between Avalanche/Blizzard (M2) and Everest/Sawtooth (M3).
    • thehias 2y ago
      That is not true. Apple claims this for PR purposes, but Marcan and Lina said on stream that the changes are not that big at all - Apple does not completely change their architecture ever. There may be bigger changes on the GPU side, but that does not affect the base upbringing (earlier Asahi versions did not have any GPU support at all, only software rendering) - also that would be work for Alyssa, not for Hector.
  • lenova 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • thehias 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • internet_points 2y ago
    > Then 2024 happened. Last year was incredibly tumultuous for me due to personal reasons which I won’t go into detail about. Suffice it to say, I ended up traveling for most of the year, all the while having to handle various abusers and stalkers who harassed and attacked me and my family (and continue to do so).
    • xyzsparetimexyz 2y ago
      Yeah but what did you expect, donations to go up during that period, stay the same or go down?
• rdtsc 2y ago
  A person can be in a tough spot personally and then things seem to spiral out of control around them because that just cannot be 100% isolated from professional stuff or other spheres of life. It seems like this might have happened to Hector based on the post. We've all been there and that part is completely understandable. > I get that some people might not have liked my Mastodon posts. Yes, I can be abrasive sometimes, and that is a fault I own up to. But this is simply not okay. I cannot work with people who form cliques behind the scenes and lie about their intentions. I cannot work with those who place blame on the messenger, instead of those who are truly toxic in the community. The abrasiveness though is the reason people react that way. Not everyone is going to respond with "hey that was abrasive, that's not how we do things, here is a better way to phrase it". The majority will simply shut down or start forming cliques in the background. I can't completely blame them either. Here is Hector threatening to launch a shaming social media campaign on kernel devs: > https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98c3-a48ab35bb9db@marcan.st/ https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98... "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas." That's not ok. Even if he feels he is right and they are wrong. People will create cliques and talk behind your back if you act that way. People will look on Rust community after this and say "Remember that time when _they_ where threatening kernel devs with social media drama?". It's not right but that's the perception that will last.
  • subjectsigma 2y ago
    I started reading the article, having little background on kernel drama, and ended it thinking to myself, “Jesus, what did this poor guy do to deserve all this hate?” Then I read the thread you linked and thought, “Oh. That.” To be clear nobody deserves to be harassed or threatened, but Hector’s messages make it clear he is astoundingly good at making himself into a victim of injustice. When his messages mentioned “cancer” I immediately thought that meant another kernel dev told someone to get cancer or die of cancer or something, which would be completely unacceptable. He was using the word metaphorically to describe the way Rust is slowly making its way into the kernel, like a cancer growing. How anyone (read: Hector) could think this requires CoC action is baffling to me. Insane language policing.
• justin66 2y ago
  He could have made life easier for those following in his footsteps if he'd not gone out in a blaze of bitter nerd glory.
• jokoon 2y ago
  Rust is great but I don't like it. I hope the language industry will either make safer languages, or at least push hard to use static analysers.
  • nrabulinski 2y ago
    Rust is static analyzer built into a compiler frontend
• deleted 2y ago
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• SamuelAdams 2y ago
  This might be crazy, but why does Ashai and its drivers need to be upstreamed to the Linux kernel at all? Why not fork Linux and call it something new, with the hardware support that is exclusively for M1/2/3/4 Mac’s?
  • exe34 2y ago
    They would have to play catch up for a few years rebasing off the latest and then eventually lose interest and it will all stop working. Same thing that happens with most arm devices that aren't upstreamed.
  • tuna74 2y ago
    As written in the article, Mesa will not enable drivers if there is no HW driver in Linux.
• scudsworth 2y ago
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• adamc 2y ago
  I found it interesting, because what the writer calls "entitled users" I would call "honest feedback". The features they need may not be what you need. Sure, they are "entitled" in that they are hoping someone else will just hand them what they want, but that's just a human thing. I'm sorry that it burned him out. But I think it is intrinsic to putting anything in the public sphere that it won't match everyone's hopes/desires/needs, that you will get such feedback, and that you have to find a way to be OK with that. (Or step back from such roles, as the author did.) People aren't going to change.
• kittikitti 2y ago
  I'm really sorry about this and I've seen your magnificent work bring so much joy to people. The harassers and abusers should be named and shamed so we can strengthen the resilience of the open source community. Let's see how they react when they get a taste of their own medicine.
• Topgamer7 2y ago
  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 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. Honestly I think working like 10+ hour days and not doing other things that are less stressful and enjoyable (people being their biggest stressor in this regard). They likely have PTSD at this point. Whatever you need Marcan. I hope you find it. I'm rooting for your health and happiness.
  • ghosty141 2y ago
    I agree. I mean constant nagging about features can definitely be annoying so I can understand that part but having the rest sounds like burnout.
  • titmouse 2y ago
    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.
• linotype 2y ago
  It’s absurd that the C/C++ community is so hard-headed about Rust. Is the Linux kernel in fifty years still going to be written in the same language it is now?
  • firemelt 2y ago
    I hope so
    • linotype 2y ago
      So even if in ten years a substantially superior language comes out and can be used to improve the kernel, would that change your opinion?
  • fluoridation 2y ago
    The people in the thread were complaining about having mixed languages in a core kernel module, not about the language being Rust. Replace Rust with any other language and their complaint would have remained. The Rust people complain about not getting technical arguments against their proposals, but how is "a module that's coded in two languages is more difficult to maintain than one coded in a single language" not a technical argument?
    • linotype 2y ago
      What’s preventing the whole module from eventually being written in Rust?
• tgtweak 2y ago
  The Rust criticism is valid - the hidden "breaking changes" have been a hallmark of rust releases and anyone maintaining a serious codebase in rust needs to really be on top of testing and validating if they want to stay current - moreso than any other language in the same stable as rust. You can't however claim the right and reason to refuse PRs and code changes under the moniker of maintenance while simultaneously claiming that the rust community is "actively hostile to a second rust compiler implementation" - you can't have it both ways. The entire narrative is very indicative of the state of open source unfortunately - incredibly adept programmers getting chewed up by the externalities of maintaining code (and by extension an application). Sometimes it's unappreciative users asking for handouts and sometimes it's other developers (or an organization's development resources) causing contention for a project's trajectory. I think the entirety of it can be summed up as: forking is there for a reason.
• throwaway2037 2y ago
  > I ended up burning out, primarily due to the very large fraction of entitled users. I stopped reading after this sentence. The God complex is simply too much for me to digest. TL;DR: "I am a programming God; they are newbie peons who refused to bow at my altar of greatness." On other posts about this person, I read multiple comments from people that could be summarised as: "This person is an (amazeballs) amazing programmer, but also a total drama queen." I say, with respect, "You will be missed. Thank you for your contributions." <sigh of relief>
• kazinator 2y ago
  > 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?
  • chippiewill 2y ago
    The Patreon was specifically started to fund the Asahi development, so it's fairly disingenuous to continue taking those donations as not everyone will keep track. He can always start a new patreon.
• darksaints 2y ago
  This was a heartbreaking and terrible read. I've been feeling a bit of disillusionment about linux quite a bit lately, mostly due to bad/weird decisions being made at the distribution level. Reading this extends that disillusionment down to the kernel level. The problems cited are portrayed as sociological problems, but I really wish people could recognize that all of them can be mitigated, either substantially or entirely, with a single purely-technical solution: microkernels. * Almost nobody needs to upstream code to the kernel * Trusted codebase size becomes negligibly small * Maintenance burden for drivers, subsystems, etc., falls on the users of the subsystems affected, and not the entire community * Broad language compatibility by service interface instead of ABI compatibility. The need for a singular compiler is reduced in scope down to the size of the subsystem instead of the entire ecosystem. The biggest problem that can't be solved purely technically is the entitled user problem, but even that is partially solved. This is because the barrier to contribution is substantially lower: * I can write code in Rust, but I don't know C. * I can easily write simple drivers for some hardware features like battery managers and fan controllers and temperature sensors, but I don't know anything about kernels. * I have a lower, but non-zero understanding of security, and would not feel comfortable writing code that runs on ring 0, but wouldn't feel inhibited writing code that benefits from process isolation. Those attributes about myself inherently mean that for a microkernel OS, I can be a contributor, but for Linux, the best I can be is an entitled user.
• bangoodirro 2y ago
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• deanmoriarty 2y ago
  I read the post and I am thankful that these people exist, most of my life is made possible through the selfless work of wonderful open source developers like this person. Sometimes I wish I was so passionate, whereas my philosophy in life towards strangers is a much simpler “fuck you, or pay me”. It allows me to sleep fairly well at night. I have a few toy projects on GitHub, a couple of which gained a tiny bit of popularity, and I simply ignored every new feature request that I didn’t need, and especially those large PRs “here, I refactored your code to make it functional and it’s so much better now”. I simply said, with no regret: “I won’t merge this, feel free to fork the project, if it’s better I might even switch myself to your project!”. Some got mad, but I truly and genuinely couldn’t care less.
• j45 2y ago
  It's awful that someone who is doing this kind of work as a volunteer experiences harassment for not making proprietary hardware work with open-source quickly enough. "... I ended up traveling for most of the year, all the while having to handle various abusers and stalkers who harassed and attacked me and my family (and continue to do so)."
• neoden 2y ago
  With all due respect to the effort.. Projects built around unsupported ways to use someone else's products, aren't they doomed from the very start? This race that you can't win isn't it a recipe for imminent burnout? I don't even mean that Apple has no interest in this project in the best case, but why Linux maintainers would want to accept changes that are necessary to support such a marginal use case?
  • opan 2y ago
    Stuff like this is fairly common. Drivers for the Wiimote and other Nintendo controllers were not put in the kernel by Nintendo employees or with their blessing. Sometimes you want something to work and the only way is to handle it yourself.
  • CRConrad 2y ago
    > unsupported ways to use someone else's products [Emphasis added -- CRC] So we're now officially acknowledging that the ostensible "owners" of Apple products don't really own their machines at all; Apple does?
• deleted 2y ago
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• reverendsteveii 2y ago
  can anyone tldr/ootl me about the mastodon posts this person alludes to? I have a feeling they might have some revelatory power.
  • weberer 2y ago
    Someone posted a Google doc in this thread that goes through all of it.
• -__---____-ZXyw 2y ago
  One aspect of all of this which I haven't seen directly addressed[0] is the question of what might be going on with Torvalds and the Rust Foundation from a longer term, dare I say "political" standpoint. Torvalds seems to usually position himself as a kind of anti-political, code-is-code type, but then, perhaps there's more to him and to this story? There's an awful lot of money and power associated with operating systems and programming languages (obviously), and the resulting "realpolitik" of situations like these seem to get swallowed up in these discussions. It makes sense for technical people to think that the technical debate is what essentially matters, but it usually never actually is. I've found the way Linux has approached Rust in the last couple of years to be a tad confusing. Always cutting a hard line, suddenly Torvalds' opinion is quite wishy washy. Oh, we'll try it, who knows, what's the worst that can happen, type thing? What induced this change, one wonders. [0] Well-written blog posts on the subject are very welcome, please share if you know one!
  • NooneAtAll3 2y ago
    > Torvalds seems to usually position himself as a kind of anti-political except when he suddenly wasn't he lost my respect the moment he went there
  • lugao 2y ago
    I can't agree more. Linus position here is not dissimilar to CEOs and alike. He's trying to deal with R4L using his (allegedly) 100% technical and 0% political perspective but in this case it simply doesn't work. R4L is a political challange that require political discussions; who decides? what's the bar? who maintains what? etc By not answering this questions and saying he doesn't want to have anything to do with the arguments, Linus simply decided that he doesn't want to solve the problem that only him can solve. The result is clear: R4L will fail if Linus decides that any maintainer can stop the "cancer" to spread and block Rust changes. R4L implies that Rust will be present in the kernel and will need to be maintained. If Linus is ok with maintainers that have a deep/fundamental problem maintaining/coordinating the maintenance of Rust code, R4L will never happen.
  • armchairhacker 2y ago
    I've heard "Linus Torvalds has refused to decide whether to accept or reject Rust, and this is a leadership failure". Maybe I'm don't know the situation enough, but I think he's not deciding because he has no idea. The "wrong" option may create far more consequences than the "right" one (so he can't e.g. flip a coin) but he has no idea which is "right". Torvalds has spent so long working with C, even if he went out of his way to learn Rust, he'd never have as much experience to get an unbiased view of both. Perhaps he's hoping people who are younger and have more equal experience, but who are still smart and experienced, will shift the project towards the correct decision. Unfortunately that's not happening, because as a solid BDFL, he's the only one who can make a shift of that size. But either shift could be a huge stain on Linux's history, and he has no idea which, so he's stuck in a horrible conundrum. If that's the case, keeping in mind that Linux is Torvalds's life's work, even if doing nothing is itself a bad choice, I don't blame him. Regardless, since Torvalds can't decide, I think the community has to come together and 1) agree on a consensus mechanism then reach a consensus (e.g. vote on it), or 2) come up with a magic third option which Torvalds can accept*. e.g. "integrate Rust into the kernel, but ensure that all future Rust compatibility issues are handled by Rust developers, even if they are caused by C code changes, through the commitment of a team of general-purpose Rust developers large enough relative to the number of C developers". I don't know if one can really ensure there are enough Rust developers to not block the C developers, but Rust is very popular and maybe growing faster than C, so maybe it's possible.
• deleted 2y ago
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• jdright 2y ago
  > I cannot work with those who denounce calling out misbehavior on social media to thousands of followers, while themselves roasting people both on social media and on mailing lists with thousands of subscribers. That person is someone called `Sima` and their posts on Mastodon are pure gas lighting. These are the worst abusers.
• sneedle 2y ago
  [dead]
• nromiun 2y ago
  > 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” (despite thousands of users, myself included, daily driving it and even using it for servers). Well, they were proved right.
  • dwattttt 2y ago
    They were, sadly, proved right not by Apple's actions, but by the kernel development community.
• vaxman 2y ago
  > "If you are interested in hiring me or know someone who might be, please get in touch. Remote positions only please, on a consulting or flexible time/non exclusive basis" https://youtu.be/2HJxya0CWco https://youtu.be/2HJxya0CWco
• milesrout 2y ago
  >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). >And, of course, “When is M3/M4 support coming?” This is awful framing. It isn't entitled to ask when something is happenint or to say what makes something unsuitable for you. Marcan seems to take every single social media comment about Asahi Linux as a direct personal attack. No wonder he is burnt out, anyone with such a habit would be...
  • adamrezich 2y ago
    To be fair, nothing in human history has psychologically prepared us for semi-real-time two-way interaction with thousands or millions many people at once. Once I realized this, I began to become much more empathetic toward popular public figures who “crash out” (as the kids say these days) on social media. I've never experienced this myself, firsthand, but after seeing this happen time and again over the course of the past two decades or so—especially since the advent of smartphones, which dramatically increased the possible frequency of such communication—it's the logical conclusion I've reached.
• xbar 2y ago
  Thank you for your efforts, Hector. I have enjoyed watching them develop and personally benefitted from the result of your work.
• threwaway54562 2y ago
  I was contributing a (very small) amount of money each month until 2024, when it seemed like Marcan had stopped working on the project. It was hard to decide to stop the financial support. On the one had I want maintainers to be able to take breaks without worrying about their livelihood. On the other hand, it was very difficult to tell what was going on and whether Marcan would ever get back to working on the project.
• procaryote 2y ago
  Regardless of where you stand on the recent friction, Asahi Linux progress has been pretty amazing considering the lack of cooperation from Apple. I hope someone else can take up the lead and that the clever people involved can continue that work
• deleted 2y ago
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• manojkarajada 2y ago
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• manojkarajada 2y ago
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• stodor89 2y ago
  In a parallel universe, people ask if they could add Rust code to dma & stuff, Hellwig says no, and life goes on without all the drama.
• xyst 2y ago
  What a shame. Seems like such a bright and articulate person. Working/contributing in FOSS is already slave labor in itself (literally, billion dollar companies depend on FOSS and many do not contribute back to the ecosystem they depend on). Then the abuse from other FOSS developers and community is just cruel. Hope the guy is able to recover mentally and physically.
• tonymet 2y ago
  His two major complaints are demanding consumers and the rejection of upstreaming his rust driver patches. He has some legitimate complaints since users depend on kernel features like Mesa Integration and Docker support for GPUs, which are critical now that people are training & doing inference . I still think the best outcome is to fork and recruit some lieutenants for community management. To me the community is losing a lot with his departure. His complaints are legitimate and hopefully linux kernel team can better accommodate his patches. many distros and corporations deliver tremendous value from their forks and it's a better solution than quitting.
• grandinj 2y ago
  Hmmm. Seems to me they took on a little too much technical risk at the start of an already complex project, to wit, buying into Rust on the kernel side. Rust in the linux kernel was always going to be a long game. You don't want to have that be a blocker when you really want is to make larger kernel changes.
• debeloo 2y ago
  Impressed that he endured 20 years of entitled users before burning out. Criticism hits incredibly hard. I'd watch a friend play for hundreds of people at a concert and he'd receive a standing ovation. But he overheard a single disgruntled remark from someone which nullified the whole experience for him. I know he was being overly sensitive about it, but I've heard similar stories from other people too.
• freetime2 2y ago
  > 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 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). These would be dealbreakers for me, too. To be clear, I am not saying that it is anyone's job to fix these issues for me. And this isn't meant as an attack on the Asahi Linux team - I think it's incredible what they have been able to do. But those comments, without any larger context to demonstrate harassment or anything like that, just don't seem too bad to me. The language could be softened a bit, sure, but the criticisms themselves resonate with me and would be valid reasons to not use Asahi Linux IMO.
  • porphyra 2y ago
    I feel like Asahi is pretty nice as a lightweight daily driver for web browsing, web development, and stuff like that. Obviously, heavy duty tasks like gaming, CAD, photo/video editing, etc are not quite there yet. I bought an M2 Macbook Air and run Asahi Linux full time and it's surprisingly smooth and bug-free (even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop tbh).
  • dimator 2y ago
    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.
    • fastball 2y ago
      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.
• greatgib 2y ago
  To me, this is more like a Rust cancer situation. Supporting and developing Rust is a nice to have, but too often its proponent try to force stuff it deeply inside important stacks that are using other languages like for Linux, or what is going on with major things in Python also. Here we can see the case, that is almost a blackmail that the Linux community is not nice and will die if they don't make Rust support core and mandatory. My point is that, if you like Rust and Rust is so nice, just go all-in, do your own kernel, do your own stuffs, and we will see the result in the end. But don't ruin existing good stuffs that were working well on their own.
• zoogeny 2y ago
  I read this entire post because the man deserves not only to have his say but also to have his say listened to. That said, I detect a lot of one sided thinking in his post. He took on an incredibly difficult challenge, faced huge opposition, made incredible technical accomplishments and he feels entitled to a standing ovation. When what he receives is criticism, entitlement and obstructionism he takes it personally. If he did all of this work hoping to get accolades, fame, clout, influence then he did it for the wrong reason. There is a mismatch between his expectations and the reality of the world. In the best of worlds, we do the right thing because it is the right thing, not because we hope for a pat on the back once it is done. In dharmic religions (e.g. Buddhism), one of the principle mental states one is to aim for is detachment from the outcomes of our actions. Suffering is attachment and Martin is clearly suffering. The other thing in Buddhism is recognizing the suffering in others, and I see a distinct lack of that recognition in Martin's post here. He acknowledges his own abrasiveness but not once does he show compassion for the maintainers who have suffered everything he has suffered, perhaps even from actions Martin himself has done. Martin has several outcomes he wants, mostly his changes (including the inclusion of Rust) being welcomed in the Linux kernel. He is attached to those outcomes and therefore takes it personally when those outcomes are not achieved. Taking a step away from this attachment is a very good step. IMO, his desire to push for these outcomes has been a significant contribution to the toxicity.
  • pharos92 2y ago
    I've worked with plenty of talented engineers who behave like this. It takes a certain psychology to achieve incredible technical feats, however they often come at the cost of personality issues in playing with others. You add these personalities together, where everybody believes they are right an everybody else is wrong then it's a recipe for disaster. People have to learn to adapt to change, or they get burnt out continually hitting the brick wall.
• deleted 2y ago
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• troad 2y ago
  This the functional equivalent of a self-pitying LiveJournal post by a moody teen that's been called out by his friends for being a bit of a dick. Marcan wants to use social brigading to get his way, Marcan wants the entire Linux kernel dev flow to bend for him, and, when none of his poorly presented demands get him what he wants, he is - of course - the victim here. Asahi is neat, but it clearly isn't a working daily driver yet, and it's not abusive to make feature requests and bug reports. Discussions around Rust in the kernel are not, and can never be, an 'injustice'. In Marcan's world, everything other than vehement agreement and immediate compliance is abusive, hostile, toxic, etc. But of course, the only toxic person here is the one threatening to wield the mob to get his way. Honestly, I'd query whether the benefit is worth the cost. I'll take average code from well-adjusted anons over clever code from bullying, hyper-online micro-influencers any day of the week.
• llama123 2y ago
  from just reading the post sounds like a shit situation for him and there is blame on the linux kernel maintainers for not handling it well. Especially if the claim about them going behind his back and shit talking him is true. What i will say, Is that i get the impression that the he is quite sensitive and takes things too personally which is a death wish online. People are savage online and if you don't have thick skin then they will destroy you. Not justifying it but it is what it is Either way hope all goes well for him. Sad to see this happen i bought a m2 mac because of linux support :(
• betaby 2y ago
  Modern Linux kernel is a corporate project which is open source. It seems that it's impossible even for very talented folks to push such work load without corporate backing both without monetary compensation and other resources like non-public documentation. It is very impressive that Asahi team has achieved, but the more hardware advances, the less realistic is to support it on enthusiasm alone.
• musicale 2y ago
  > 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.
• Uptrenda 2y ago
  Drama queen bullshit doesn't belong on HN.
• anon8644667533 2y ago
  It seems at the heart of the issue is the vision for the future of Linux kernel. One group believes it is Rust (progressives), one group doesn't believe that and wants to continue with C (conservatives). If they cannot find a way to live at peace with each other, I think the only solution is for the Rust folks to start building the kernel in Rust and not try to "convert" the existing kernel to Rust piece by piece. Why they cannot live in peace seems to be: a way that C kernel folks would not need to deal with Rust code. At the core, the story is not that different from introducing new languages to a project. You are introducing a new tax on everyone to pay for the new goodies you like, and those who are going to be taxed and don't like the new goodies are resisting.
• daurentius523 2y ago
  Hot take: C is simple language Rust is lojban. Trying to convince people who like C to Rust was bad idea.
• pts_ 2y ago
  Linux sounds like a super toxic place now.
• HereIGoAgain 2y ago
  Don' let the door hit you on the way out i guess. I mean it sounds mean but the scene can do with less toxic types like this, who try to bully people who know better, in order to get their way. Even worse in this case since he actually tried to create a social media shit-storm against those he disagreed with. He even has defenders calling for yet more CoCs in order to better "deal with" people who "get in the way." It doesn't get much more toxic than that.