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> 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

> 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.
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      When you pay for something, you’ve already demonstrated that you value whatever it is (a product, a service, etc). Free stuff tends to attract people who don’t value the thing.
      - throwway120385 2y ago
        There's also a level of professionalism depending on the product. When I'm responsible for an MSP team I'm very polite to them and always try to get them good, detailed, high-quality information when I'm telling them about problems with their work product, because I want them to do good work quickly and that's the best way to do that.
        ryandrake 2y ago
        Yea, I'm not sure it's open-source vs other software. It's public vs. professional insiders. My company's bug tracker is mostly internally-filed bugs, but accepts bugs from the public. The difference in tone and attitude is night and day. The public-filed bugs can be wild, varying across: Rude, entitled, arrogant, demanding, incoherent, insulting, irrelevant, impatient... They are also the worst when it comes to actually including enough information to investigate. Frequently filed without logs, without reproduction steps, sometimes without even saying what the filer thinks is wrong. We get bugs with titles "It doesn't work" and with a text description that reads like a fever dream from someone very unwell. We do have strong personalities among employees, but bug reports tend to be professionally and competently written, contain enough information to debug, and always, always leave out insults and personal attacks. The general public (at least many of the ones technical enough to file bug reports) does not seem to have the emotional regulation required to communicate professionally and respectfully.
- lasereyes136 2y ago
  I agree that this is needed. It doesn't stop the person requesting the feature from asking for a meeting to explain why and just whining that they need it the whole time and saying they shouldn't have pay anything to get it addressed right now. Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly and I never had more than 1 meeting a quarter with really toxic people and they were at least paying for the product and maintenance so hearing them out was part of the job. It unfortunate to get to the point where you view customer requests as antagonistic, but I can see how it happens. Some people really feel entitled, and some have a job to do and limited resources or control to do it in.
  - drivers99 2y ago
    > Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly [...] hearing them out was part of the job Does it have to be a meeting? Although it's about sales calls, I'm reminded of https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 )
    - lasereyes136 2y ago
      No, it doesn't have to be a meeting. It can be any method communication.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Yep. I've been working on Ardour for 25 years now, and it took me 7-10 years to develop the right kind of skin for dealing with "user feedback". For me, the right kind of skin was basically to shed such stuff like water off a duck's back. Whether someone is saying "I've been using Logic for 10 years and this is so much easier and intuitive" or "You should be ashamed for asking anyone to pay for this steaming pile of shit" (both real quotes), I had to be able to shrug and carry on with whatever my development priorities were anyway. That said, I sympathize very much with Marcan on this project: getting the basic infrastructure for Linux operational on new hardware inflames passions much more than a niche project like a DAW.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Thank you for Ardour btw, great piece of software although I still use Ableton from time to time, Ardour is taking over more and more parts for me :) I've read your comments here (and elsewhere) for a long time, and I'm sure you'd have some great ideas or at least opinions about this, which is pretty relevant to what you just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      I think my experience actually making a living from a FLOSS project changes things enough that it is not that relevant to people doing it "for the love it" or as a side-project. It's much easier to shrug off strong comments when the people who do support you are making it possible for you (and one other) to lead a pretty comfortable middle class life.
  - paines 2y ago
    God how I hate these arguments. You have this especially with Gimp. "But my beloved multibillion company worth product can do X sooo much better and easier. Also it has 16bit bla bla bla." You don't say?!?!?!? Any tips how to get a thicker skin, or it grows on you over the years ? Also, thanks for Ardour. I am a hobby cellist and record sometimes myself using Ardour and to cut down samples for an app I am working on. I tried doing that with my iPhone which worked like crap. Yup!
- manquer 2y ago
  > you can make it faster Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.
- duxup 2y ago
  I always tell this story about working with sales at a job where I worked in tech support. Sales would call me up and ask why I hadn't talked to their client about their very important ticket. I would tell them: "I have 5 P1 tickets, 8 P2 tickets, and dozens of P3 tickets. Your ticket is a P3 ticket." They would ask that I change it to a P1. I would. Then they would call me an hour later asking me about the ticket and I would tell them: "I have 6 P1 tickets." That's when they'd understand ;)
  - pmontra 2y ago
    That's when they understand that they have to start fighting their peers and talking with the big boss to get their P1 ticket moved in front of the other P1 tickets.
    - duxup 2y ago
      Yup, but it gets them out of my hair, and they understand the support guy isn't in a position to wave a magic wand for them. If sales guy wins his fight with the folks in charge and I get time / resources to work on his thing, fine with me. Otherwise he knows he's 6th in line.
    - anyfoo 2y ago
      So? If they succeed (big if), then that ticket is your new priority. Maybe even for good reason, maybe not. But usually you don’t care that much which one you work on first, do you?
    - thombat 2y ago
      At Symbian defects were classified from P1-P4, with the inevitable shit-fights about adding magic runes to the title so everyone knows that your P1 is more important than theirs. The day came when, after prolonged hand wringing and with stern observations about great power and great responsibility, the priority could be set to P0. But like any bunch of junkies we came off this new high all too quickly and the P-1 classification arrived, the showstopper of showstoppers. In hindsight what I most regret is that we stuck with an integer field; we were denied the expressive power of fractionally critical issues.
- timewizard 2y ago
  Open source is about liberating computing not about liberating users. If you're supporting end users you need to be collecting money from them. The mechanics of this system are entirely upside down. The corporations have bought into open source to regain control of computing and passionate developers are mired in the swamp of dumb user requests. Something went very wrong here.
LudwigNagasena 2y ago
I don't get that complaint. None of those messages demand anything from anyone or berate Asahi Linux. It's just useful feedback and questions.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I had a similar thought. The tone of the messages was a little rough and they definitely could have used some better tact knowing that the project developers would see it, but ultimately those are just factual statements delivered with brutal bluntness.
  - xyzsparetimexyz 2y ago
    Right exactly. They're not tactful, but they also weren't in bad faith. Marcan should have taken 5 minutes to realize that he's the boss, he's the one doing the work, nobody is entitled to anything in free software and that if people want a feature sooner they can either fund the project or kick rocks. Anyone who's been in open source for over 2, definitely 3 understands this. > 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. This is the big problem really. He should have just turned down his work hours to a regular 40 a week, asked for more donations to pay more people and asked for more volunteer help. And honestly, probably therapy.
- georgemcbay 2y ago
  This is the same person that resigned as a kernel maintainer (focus on Apple/Arm unsurprisingly) about a week ago. I don't know this person so this is completely baseless speculation but I assume they are "going through it" in some way and experiencing significant burnout, which based on my own experience in the past has a way of (negatively) amplifying all sorts of interactions that are related to the source of your burnout.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
jeroenhd 2y ago
Open source attracts some of the very worst users. Often people pretending to be trying to help by "suggesting improvements", but just as often entitled people who want to work for free. I don't think policies will change that. It's just something you have to accept when you provide something useful to lots of people for free. Even if you use moderated environments for user feedback (adding the burden of constantly banning people), people will find your email address and complain to you directly. See also: jwz/xscreensaver/Debian drama. Seeing how people treat open source developers makes me hesitant to upload any code I write to a public repository. I'd expect the worst part for an Asahi project contributor to be the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust. Users being unreasonable is one thing, but your fellow maintainers are supposed to be allies at least. I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.
- sertraline 2y ago
  That's what I get with my software projects. People tell me that it sucks and I suck at code and other projects have it better, and don't forget to waste months of your time rewriting to Rust, and don't you dare to use unsafe all over your code (see: actix drama)... sigh. But when asked to show their alternative they get silent. So as long as you keep being assertive this is fine. For everyone who comes and behaves like a drama queen you have to prove again and again that talk is cheap and code is how you get the job done. Or you simply ignore them.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  > I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess. The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. I hope he'll be someday able to process what happened, why and reach appropriate conclusions. Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.
  - noizejoy 2y ago
    > Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity. Yes. > The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. Not necessarily. You can also treat project politics and social skills like any other technical skills that you need on your team like network engineering or database optimization. If you can find trusted collaborators with those social and political skills, you can make a lot of things happen without necessarily being very good at it yourself. Team building has a lot of parallels with building a full stack technology. Or building a sports team.
bebop 2y ago
I work for a company that is open source and has a large community. I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be. For some reason people feel that it is appropriate to throw barbs in their issue reports. Please to everyone out there, if you find an issue and want to report it (hurray open source!) please be kind with your words. There are real people on the other side of the issue. Always remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
- HankB99 2y ago
  > I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be. That seems to be a general characteristic. I strive to be cheerful and helpful whenever I'm asking for something. I feel like (sadly) it sets me apart from the crowd and helps me to get what I'm asking for. And IAC, with so little effort on my part I may brighten someone else' day and that makes me happy. Just last week I asked housekeeping at a hotel for an old style coffee pot since I had brought my own coffee and filters. I started with "Can I pester you a moment?" and the conversation went up from there. Housekeeping was extremely friendly and helpful. Later I guessed this might have been her way to disarm some of the typical hostile interchanges she's been the brunt of.
  - flkiwi 2y ago
    I always feel like I'm imposing, and I have to remind myself that there are people who are eager to hear what I have to say. I try to set up my issue reports with appropriate background, and I always volunteer to, for example, submit a PR for a documentation change if the resolution requires it. And I have had some of the most wonderful interactions with complete strangers who had an idea, built a tool for themselves, and found other people had the same need. There's a broader topic of ... just be nice to people. It doesn't cost anything. It does reassure me that this universe has been struggling with this for decades upon decades--witness the Malvin and Jim scene in WarGames. "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively?"
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  It always surprises me how happy people are when you submit a bug report with example code which demonstrates the problem. Like, irrationally happy.
tguinot 2y ago
No good deed goes unpunished.
bayindirh 2y ago
[Putting my dusty Linux Distro Maintainer Hat on] First of all, I wholeheartedly applaud Marcan for carrying the project this far. They, both as individuals and as a team proper, did great things. What I can say is a rest is well deserved at this point, because he really poured his soul into this and worn himself down. On the other hand, I'll need to say something, however not in bad faith. He needs to stop fighting with the winds he can't control. Users gonna be users, and people gonna be people. Everyone won't be happy, never ever. Even you integrate from applications to silicon level, not everyone is happy what Apple has accomplished technically. Even though Linux is making the world go on, we have seen friction now and then (tipping my hat to another thing he just went through), so he need to improve his soft skills. Make no mistake, I'm not making this comment from high above. I was extremely bad at it, and I was bullied online and offline for a decade, and it didn't help to be on the right side of the argument, either. So, I understand how it feels and how he's heartbroken and fuming right now, and rightly so. However, humans are not an exact science, and learning to work together with people with strong technical chops is a literal superpower. I wish Hector a speedy recovery, a good rest and a bright future. I want to finish with the opening page of Joel Spolsky's "Joel on Software": Technical problems are easy, people are hard. Godspeed Hector. I'm waiting for your return.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  It's not just that "people are hard" - it was clear that this will end up this way the moment marcan started ranting on social media about having to send kernel patches via e-mails. Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code. Not realizing that is a sure road to burnout (and yes, I'm just as guilty of that myself).
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > Not realizing that is a sure road to burnout (and yes, I'm just as guilty of that myself). Humans are shaped by experience. This is both a boon and a curse. I have been also been on the hot end of the stick and burned myself down, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. Understanding that I don't want to go through this anymore was the point I started to change. > Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code. Writing the code is at most 5% of software development IME. This is what I always say to people I work with. I absolutely love writing code, but there are so many and more important activities around that, I can't just ignore them and churn out code.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
segmondy 2y ago
You gotta have super thick skin to be a maintainer of an opensource project or even be popular on the net these days. Folks are going to come for you for whatever reason, if you read too much into it you're going to have a bad time.
mrtksn 2y ago
Never ever give away anything for free if you intend to support it is an evergreen advice. Selling ads? Using it as a gateway to a commercial product? Selling support? Have some genius business plan that allows you to make money in the future? Fine, give it away no strings attached but expecting that users will be grateful is a mistake developers keep repeating. The free users are just as entitled, even more entitled as they don’t have a price tag for your efforts and don’t have a document specifying what are your obligations so they can assume scope of entitlements anyway they wish. Since you gave it for free, you can’t refund an unhappy customers to make it go away. If it looks like a product, You will be stuck with people who think they did their part by using your products and you failed them. Some may make it a full time job to take a revenge on this injustice. I’m not even sure that these users are at fault, you actually took something in exchange(like fame, street cred etc) and you are not delivering your part.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Paying users can be incredibly entitled, sometimes even more than people who don’t pay you a dime. The problem is the moment you accept a cent people expect you to do work for them, regardless of whether the money is actually “worth” how much effort needs to go into a feature. The open source projects I’ve worked on get donations but sometimes people will put up like $10 for their pet feature which takes a week to write. Like, thanks for your contribution, but this actually doesn’t affect my priorities at all.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    You refund them and it’s solved. You don’t have that option with free users.
    - kobebrookskC3 2y ago
      why not? just tell them "if you don't like it, you can get a refund" (aka fuck off)
      - 2y ago
palata 2y ago
I have been maintaining open source projects, and really: users of open source projects suck. They get your work for free, but it's not enough; they have to be assholes on top of that.
- asddubs 2y ago
  I would say it's more the case that the users who suck are both the loudest and also seem the loudest. If you get 10 people saying thank you and one person cussing you out, it might still ruin your day. And of course a lot of people just quietly use the thing and are happy with it, and you never hear from them at all.
  - palata 2y ago
    Totally. Though I am pretty confident I don't get 10 people saying thank you for one cussing me out :-). People become vocal when they are pissed.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
It's fair criticism. Asahi is paraded around like a real alternative, well where are the features? > we brought the platform from nothing to one of the smoothest Linux experiences you can get on a laptop. Despite the accomplishment this overselling irks me.
freehorse 2y ago
I think entitlement like that is stupid and bad for open source (and everything). However, in the next paragraph the author gets into criticising the opposite position, that asahi linux was not ready for everyday use. The entitled requests came from users that thought of asahi linux as exactly covering an everyday use case, a linux distro they should be able to use to carry on their tasks. This I find contradictory. While some entitled users always exist, you can either admit that asahi is not a daily driver for people who want to use most of basic features of a laptop, or admit that the requests make sense. You cannot both claim that asahi is fine to be used, and complain that users ask for being able to connect an external monitor on a M1 macbook air. I am not sure what is wrong with the claim that asahi linux is an experimental (and no less amazing) project that people lacks certain (widely considered basic when things come to this) functionality, or that the functionality of it is restricted to these use cases that may include using it as a headless server but exclude some common other ones. I am not sure how this would matter, but setting user expectations to a level that matched the state of development may have helped to limit such requests. I say that also because I have been gotten quite a few responses from people that I should use asahi, while looking at what it supports it definitely would not make sense for me, and you cannot just present it to a macos alternative right now.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  Thing is it will never get to be a daily driver if people don't use it and shake out the bugs. 25 years ago (huh, long time), when Windows ME pissed me off for good, linux wasn't exactly known for being a daily driver but I gave it a try and, unsurprisingly, it did become reliable over the years. Other than Gnome's propensity to make stupid changes to default settings I can't remember the last time I had to even think about messing with the underlying system and other than a simple google search on the linux compatibility of hardware before I buy I just don't think about it. Actually, I take that back, when I first got my current laptop I was messing around to get the AMD mesa drivers (or whatever) working because I wanted to mess around with this fancy GPGPU thing. Personally, if I were to buy a macbook it would be for the OS and not dodgy linux support because I've walked that road before. If the Christmas sales were just a tiny bit better though...
WD-42 2y ago
This whole post feels like typical burnout. Imagine porting something as complex as Linux to a platform who's creators actively do not want Linux ported to it. Of course you will burn our eventually. Not to dismiss his experiences, but I wonder if there is some deflection going on here - burnout was happening anyway but blaming others is a good smoke-screen.
- debeloo 2y ago
  > burnout was happening anyway but blaming others is a good smoke-screen. Oh no. I'm convinced majority of burnouts are almost entirely caused by dealing with shitty people and/or shitty processes. Shitty processes sometimes happen without shitty people, the people involved just let it happen.
_zoltan_ 2y ago
Let's be honest it's still pretty useless.
bmacho 2y ago
> This sounds so rough. I can't imagine pouring your heart out into this labor of love and continue to have to face something like this. Or: he shouldn't steal people's time with false advertising :shrug: Also if he wants to create an operating system, then these aren't even requests, but bug reports. So the users ate his false advertising, spent time to try out his system, then spent some more time to file bug reports, and then he calls them "entitled users".
- iczero 2y ago
  Where is an example of this "false advertising"?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bmacho 2y ago
    Actually they have a device support page: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support I can't imagine then what's his problem. I don't get offended by people that can't even read. I don't normally call them people let alone entitled :\ Set up a bot that links them the device support page, and problem solved? I don't get it
    - debeloo 2y ago
      > I don't get it. I think that might be the problem. It's comments like these that causes people to wear out.
      - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        > It's comments like these that causes people to wear out. No it isn't. You - fundamentally - don't get to control what people say to you. You need to filter how to take that. And that's incredibly hard. Especially in open source. You need to both be able to ignore (some version of "idiots, who can't be bothered to read") and be openminded enough to take weird requests, because they could be the starting point of a new major contributor. The second is optional, as long as you are happy just doing your thing, but then the former probably won't become a problem for you.
latexr 2y ago
> I wonder if something like that would be helpful for open source community engagement. It’s called a Code of Conduct. It exists and is in use by many organisations, including several open-source projects.
- inemesitaffia 2y ago
  Very funny
xyst 2y ago
Apple users today are just Windows users with even more entitlement. Wasn’t always like this, I think. Personally have seen the same with other projects and dealing with proprietary Apple APIs and their walled in garden is hard enough.
viraptor 2y ago
It sounds like he really got invested too much into what people wrote. > “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” These are not even requests. These are objective statements he can either take note of for prioritisation or ignore. I can also say Asahi is useless to me until usb-c monitors support, but that's just my situation - there's no bad faith or request here. Previously that was the same for WiFi support. I wish there was some good model for maintainers of bigger projects to deal with this on a personal level. The bigger the project, the more people there will be with unmet requirements and that's just life. It literally can't be solved.
thomastjeffery 2y ago
People complain about things that they care about. People also don't usually have as much tact as we would like them to. I think the best way to deal with this is to just confidently say what you are and are not ready to get done. The social dynamic will always be this way, so we may as well take whatever criticism is useful, leave the rest behind, and move on.
FpUser 2y ago
>"I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one" Actually if this distro is my primary / only one I would like to be able to check CPU, GPU, etc. temperature. It is important to know if cooling is adequate or requires cleaning / repair. In any case Marcan would be way better off having thick skin. Users will always be assholes (well same is generally true about vendors).
CrimsonRain 2y ago
why not tag it as pre-alpha, not suitable for daily use? Saying smoothest linux experience on one side and expecting people to not expect basic features of the hardware working...how does that work? "Heavily under development and not ready for prime time use" should have been first line in readme and only reply to such feature request. So it sounds like they bit more than they could chew.
DyslexicAtheist 2y ago
from what I've seen of his grandstanding on the LKML suggesting to bully people on social media, I've lost all respect for the guy. He is a person in power considering all his social media clout, and this is how he uses it. I'm glad he realizes that it's time to sit back and reflect. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. He will be of much more use to the community, and more importantly himself after confronting his ego.
- sph 2y ago
  There are two types of VIP developers: those that stay in the shadows and do their work (think the Bram Moolenaars and Daniel Stenbergs) and those that seem to spend their entire time picking fights on social media and writing very emotionally charged blog posts that routinely reach the HN front page, because gossip and drama sells.

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.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    When you pay for something, you’ve already demonstrated that you value whatever it is (a product, a service, etc). Free stuff tends to attract people who don’t value the thing.
    - throwway120385 2y ago
      There's also a level of professionalism depending on the product. When I'm responsible for an MSP team I'm very polite to them and always try to get them good, detailed, high-quality information when I'm telling them about problems with their work product, because I want them to do good work quickly and that's the best way to do that.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        Yea, I'm not sure it's open-source vs other software. It's public vs. professional insiders. My company's bug tracker is mostly internally-filed bugs, but accepts bugs from the public. The difference in tone and attitude is night and day. The public-filed bugs can be wild, varying across: Rude, entitled, arrogant, demanding, incoherent, insulting, irrelevant, impatient... They are also the worst when it comes to actually including enough information to investigate. Frequently filed without logs, without reproduction steps, sometimes without even saying what the filer thinks is wrong. We get bugs with titles "It doesn't work" and with a text description that reads like a fever dream from someone very unwell. We do have strong personalities among employees, but bug reports tend to be professionally and competently written, contain enough information to debug, and always, always leave out insults and personal attacks. The general public (at least many of the ones technical enough to file bug reports) does not seem to have the emotional regulation required to communicate professionally and respectfully.
lasereyes136 2y ago
I agree that this is needed. It doesn't stop the person requesting the feature from asking for a meeting to explain why and just whining that they need it the whole time and saying they shouldn't have pay anything to get it addressed right now. Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly and I never had more than 1 meeting a quarter with really toxic people and they were at least paying for the product and maintenance so hearing them out was part of the job. It unfortunate to get to the point where you view customer requests as antagonistic, but I can see how it happens. Some people really feel entitled, and some have a job to do and limited resources or control to do it in.
- drivers99 2y ago
  > Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly [...] hearing them out was part of the job Does it have to be a meeting? Although it's about sales calls, I'm reminded of https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 )
  - lasereyes136 2y ago
    No, it doesn't have to be a meeting. It can be any method communication.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Yep. I've been working on Ardour for 25 years now, and it took me 7-10 years to develop the right kind of skin for dealing with "user feedback". For me, the right kind of skin was basically to shed such stuff like water off a duck's back. Whether someone is saying "I've been using Logic for 10 years and this is so much easier and intuitive" or "You should be ashamed for asking anyone to pay for this steaming pile of shit" (both real quotes), I had to be able to shrug and carry on with whatever my development priorities were anyway. That said, I sympathize very much with Marcan on this project: getting the basic infrastructure for Linux operational on new hardware inflames passions much more than a niche project like a DAW.
- diggan 2y ago
  Thank you for Ardour btw, great piece of software although I still use Ableton from time to time, Ardour is taking over more and more parts for me :) I've read your comments here (and elsewhere) for a long time, and I'm sure you'd have some great ideas or at least opinions about this, which is pretty relevant to what you just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I think my experience actually making a living from a FLOSS project changes things enough that it is not that relevant to people doing it "for the love it" or as a side-project. It's much easier to shrug off strong comments when the people who do support you are making it possible for you (and one other) to lead a pretty comfortable middle class life.
- paines 2y ago
  God how I hate these arguments. You have this especially with Gimp. "But my beloved multibillion company worth product can do X sooo much better and easier. Also it has 16bit bla bla bla." You don't say?!?!?!? Any tips how to get a thicker skin, or it grows on you over the years ? Also, thanks for Ardour. I am a hobby cellist and record sometimes myself using Ardour and to cut down samples for an app I am working on. I tried doing that with my iPhone which worked like crap. Yup!
manquer 2y ago
> you can make it faster Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.
duxup 2y ago
I always tell this story about working with sales at a job where I worked in tech support. Sales would call me up and ask why I hadn't talked to their client about their very important ticket. I would tell them: "I have 5 P1 tickets, 8 P2 tickets, and dozens of P3 tickets. Your ticket is a P3 ticket." They would ask that I change it to a P1. I would. Then they would call me an hour later asking me about the ticket and I would tell them: "I have 6 P1 tickets." That's when they'd understand ;)
- pmontra 2y ago
  That's when they understand that they have to start fighting their peers and talking with the big boss to get their P1 ticket moved in front of the other P1 tickets.
  - duxup 2y ago
    Yup, but it gets them out of my hair, and they understand the support guy isn't in a position to wave a magic wand for them. If sales guy wins his fight with the folks in charge and I get time / resources to work on his thing, fine with me. Otherwise he knows he's 6th in line.
  - anyfoo 2y ago
    So? If they succeed (big if), then that ticket is your new priority. Maybe even for good reason, maybe not. But usually you don’t care that much which one you work on first, do you?
  - thombat 2y ago
    At Symbian defects were classified from P1-P4, with the inevitable shit-fights about adding magic runes to the title so everyone knows that your P1 is more important than theirs. The day came when, after prolonged hand wringing and with stern observations about great power and great responsibility, the priority could be set to P0. But like any bunch of junkies we came off this new high all too quickly and the P-1 classification arrived, the showstopper of showstoppers. In hindsight what I most regret is that we stuck with an integer field; we were denied the expressive power of fractionally critical issues.
timewizard 2y ago
Open source is about liberating computing not about liberating users. If you're supporting end users you need to be collecting money from them. The mechanics of this system are entirely upside down. The corporations have bought into open source to regain control of computing and passionate developers are mired in the swamp of dumb user requests. Something went very wrong here.

LudwigNagasena 2y ago

I don't get that complaint. None of those messages demand anything from anyone or berate Asahi Linux. It's just useful feedback and questions.

freedomben 2y ago
I had a similar thought. The tone of the messages was a little rough and they definitely could have used some better tact knowing that the project developers would see it, but ultimately those are just factual statements delivered with brutal bluntness.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2y ago
  Right exactly. They're not tactful, but they also weren't in bad faith. Marcan should have taken 5 minutes to realize that he's the boss, he's the one doing the work, nobody is entitled to anything in free software and that if people want a feature sooner they can either fund the project or kick rocks. Anyone who's been in open source for over 2, definitely 3 understands this. > 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. This is the big problem really. He should have just turned down his work hours to a regular 40 a week, asked for more donations to pay more people and asked for more volunteer help. And honestly, probably therapy.
georgemcbay 2y ago
This is the same person that resigned as a kernel maintainer (focus on Apple/Arm unsurprisingly) about a week ago. I don't know this person so this is completely baseless speculation but I assume they are "going through it" in some way and experiencing significant burnout, which based on my own experience in the past has a way of (negatively) amplifying all sorts of interactions that are related to the source of your burnout.
ActorNightly 2y ago

jeroenhd 2y ago

Open source attracts some of the very worst users. Often people pretending to be trying to help by "suggesting improvements", but just as often entitled people who want to work for free. I don't think policies will change that. It's just something you have to accept when you provide something useful to lots of people for free. Even if you use moderated environments for user feedback (adding the burden of constantly banning people), people will find your email address and complain to you directly. See also: jwz/xscreensaver/Debian drama. Seeing how people treat open source developers makes me hesitant to upload any code I write to a public repository. I'd expect the worst part for an Asahi project contributor to be the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust. Users being unreasonable is one thing, but your fellow maintainers are supposed to be allies at least. I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.

sertraline 2y ago
That's what I get with my software projects. People tell me that it sucks and I suck at code and other projects have it better, and don't forget to waste months of your time rewriting to Rust, and don't you dare to use unsafe all over your code (see: actix drama)... sigh. But when asked to show their alternative they get silent. So as long as you keep being assertive this is fine. For everyone who comes and behaves like a drama queen you have to prove again and again that talk is cheap and code is how you get the job done. Or you simply ignore them.
seba_dos1 2y ago
> I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess. The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. I hope he'll be someday able to process what happened, why and reach appropriate conclusions. Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity.
- noizejoy 2y ago
  > Software development is a social activity, especially with relatively high-visibility projects like Asahi, and it comes with just as usual burden of social troubles as any other kind of social activity. Yes. > The only way to do that is to never collaborate with anyone else. Not necessarily. You can also treat project politics and social skills like any other technical skills that you need on your team like network engineering or database optimization. If you can find trusted collaborators with those social and political skills, you can make a lot of things happen without necessarily being very good at it yourself. Team building has a lot of parallels with building a full stack technology. Or building a sports team.

bebop 2y ago

I work for a company that is open source and has a large community. I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be. For some reason people feel that it is appropriate to throw barbs in their issue reports. Please to everyone out there, if you find an issue and want to report it (hurray open source!) please be kind with your words. There are real people on the other side of the issue. Always remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

HankB99 2y ago
> I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be. That seems to be a general characteristic. I strive to be cheerful and helpful whenever I'm asking for something. I feel like (sadly) it sets me apart from the crowd and helps me to get what I'm asking for. And IAC, with so little effort on my part I may brighten someone else' day and that makes me happy. Just last week I asked housekeeping at a hotel for an old style coffee pot since I had brought my own coffee and filters. I started with "Can I pester you a moment?" and the conversation went up from there. Housekeeping was extremely friendly and helpful. Later I guessed this might have been her way to disarm some of the typical hostile interchanges she's been the brunt of.
- flkiwi 2y ago
  I always feel like I'm imposing, and I have to remind myself that there are people who are eager to hear what I have to say. I try to set up my issue reports with appropriate background, and I always volunteer to, for example, submit a PR for a documentation change if the resolution requires it. And I have had some of the most wonderful interactions with complete strangers who had an idea, built a tool for themselves, and found other people had the same need. There's a broader topic of ... just be nice to people. It doesn't cost anything. It does reassure me that this universe has been struggling with this for decades upon decades--witness the Malvin and Jim scene in WarGames. "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively?"
UncleEntity 2y ago
It always surprises me how happy people are when you submit a bug report with example code which demonstrates the problem. Like, irrationally happy.

tguinot 2y ago

No good deed goes unpunished.

bayindirh 2y ago

[Putting my dusty Linux Distro Maintainer Hat on] First of all, I wholeheartedly applaud Marcan for carrying the project this far. They, both as individuals and as a team proper, did great things. What I can say is a rest is well deserved at this point, because he really poured his soul into this and worn himself down. On the other hand, I'll need to say something, however not in bad faith. He needs to stop fighting with the winds he can't control. Users gonna be users, and people gonna be people. Everyone won't be happy, never ever. Even you integrate from applications to silicon level, not everyone is happy what Apple has accomplished technically. Even though Linux is making the world go on, we have seen friction now and then (tipping my hat to another thing he just went through), so he need to improve his soft skills. Make no mistake, I'm not making this comment from high above. I was extremely bad at it, and I was bullied online and offline for a decade, and it didn't help to be on the right side of the argument, either. So, I understand how it feels and how he's heartbroken and fuming right now, and rightly so. However, humans are not an exact science, and learning to work together with people with strong technical chops is a literal superpower. I wish Hector a speedy recovery, a good rest and a bright future. I want to finish with the opening page of Joel Spolsky's "Joel on Software": Technical problems are easy, people are hard. Godspeed Hector. I'm waiting for your return.

seba_dos1 2y ago
It's not just that "people are hard" - it was clear that this will end up this way the moment marcan started ranting on social media about having to send kernel patches via e-mails. Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code. Not realizing that is a sure road to burnout (and yes, I'm just as guilty of that myself).
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > Not realizing that is a sure road to burnout (and yes, I'm just as guilty of that myself). Humans are shaped by experience. This is both a boon and a curse. I have been also been on the hot end of the stick and burned myself down, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. Understanding that I don't want to go through this anymore was the point I started to change. > Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code. Writing the code is at most 5% of software development IME. This is what I always say to people I work with. I absolutely love writing code, but there are so many and more important activities around that, I can't just ignore them and churn out code.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

segmondy 2y ago

You gotta have super thick skin to be a maintainer of an opensource project or even be popular on the net these days. Folks are going to come for you for whatever reason, if you read too much into it you're going to have a bad time.

mrtksn 2y ago

Never ever give away anything for free if you intend to support it is an evergreen advice. Selling ads? Using it as a gateway to a commercial product? Selling support? Have some genius business plan that allows you to make money in the future? Fine, give it away no strings attached but expecting that users will be grateful is a mistake developers keep repeating. The free users are just as entitled, even more entitled as they don’t have a price tag for your efforts and don’t have a document specifying what are your obligations so they can assume scope of entitlements anyway they wish. Since you gave it for free, you can’t refund an unhappy customers to make it go away. If it looks like a product, You will be stuck with people who think they did their part by using your products and you failed them. Some may make it a full time job to take a revenge on this injustice. I’m not even sure that these users are at fault, you actually took something in exchange(like fame, street cred etc) and you are not delivering your part.

saagarjha 2y ago
Paying users can be incredibly entitled, sometimes even more than people who don’t pay you a dime. The problem is the moment you accept a cent people expect you to do work for them, regardless of whether the money is actually “worth” how much effort needs to go into a feature. The open source projects I’ve worked on get donations but sometimes people will put up like $10 for their pet feature which takes a week to write. Like, thanks for your contribution, but this actually doesn’t affect my priorities at all.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  You refund them and it’s solved. You don’t have that option with free users.
  - kobebrookskC3 2y ago
    why not? just tell them "if you don't like it, you can get a refund" (aka fuck off)
    - 2y ago

palata 2y ago

I have been maintaining open source projects, and really: users of open source projects suck. They get your work for free, but it's not enough; they have to be assholes on top of that.

asddubs 2y ago
I would say it's more the case that the users who suck are both the loudest and also seem the loudest. If you get 10 people saying thank you and one person cussing you out, it might still ruin your day. And of course a lot of people just quietly use the thing and are happy with it, and you never hear from them at all.
- palata 2y ago
  Totally. Though I am pretty confident I don't get 10 people saying thank you for one cussing me out :-). People become vocal when they are pissed.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

It's fair criticism. Asahi is paraded around like a real alternative, well where are the features? > we brought the platform from nothing to one of the smoothest Linux experiences you can get on a laptop. Despite the accomplishment this overselling irks me.

freehorse 2y ago

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

UncleEntity 2y ago
Thing is it will never get to be a daily driver if people don't use it and shake out the bugs. 25 years ago (huh, long time), when Windows ME pissed me off for good, linux wasn't exactly known for being a daily driver but I gave it a try and, unsurprisingly, it did become reliable over the years. Other than Gnome's propensity to make stupid changes to default settings I can't remember the last time I had to even think about messing with the underlying system and other than a simple google search on the linux compatibility of hardware before I buy I just don't think about it. Actually, I take that back, when I first got my current laptop I was messing around to get the AMD mesa drivers (or whatever) working because I wanted to mess around with this fancy GPGPU thing. Personally, if I were to buy a macbook it would be for the OS and not dodgy linux support because I've walked that road before. If the Christmas sales were just a tiny bit better though...

WD-42 2y ago

This whole post feels like typical burnout. Imagine porting something as complex as Linux to a platform who's creators actively do not want Linux ported to it. Of course you will burn our eventually. Not to dismiss his experiences, but I wonder if there is some deflection going on here - burnout was happening anyway but blaming others is a good smoke-screen.

debeloo 2y ago
> burnout was happening anyway but blaming others is a good smoke-screen. Oh no. I'm convinced majority of burnouts are almost entirely caused by dealing with shitty people and/or shitty processes. Shitty processes sometimes happen without shitty people, the people involved just let it happen.

_zoltan_ 2y ago

Let's be honest it's still pretty useless.

bmacho 2y ago

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

iczero 2y ago
Where is an example of this "false advertising"?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bmacho 2y ago
  Actually they have a device support page: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support I can't imagine then what's his problem. I don't get offended by people that can't even read. I don't normally call them people let alone entitled :\ Set up a bot that links them the device support page, and problem solved? I don't get it
  - debeloo 2y ago
    > I don't get it. I think that might be the problem. It's comments like these that causes people to wear out.
    - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
      > It's comments like these that causes people to wear out. No it isn't. You - fundamentally - don't get to control what people say to you. You need to filter how to take that. And that's incredibly hard. Especially in open source. You need to both be able to ignore (some version of "idiots, who can't be bothered to read") and be openminded enough to take weird requests, because they could be the starting point of a new major contributor. The second is optional, as long as you are happy just doing your thing, but then the former probably won't become a problem for you.

latexr 2y ago

> I wonder if something like that would be helpful for open source community engagement. It’s called a Code of Conduct. It exists and is in use by many organisations, including several open-source projects.

inemesitaffia 2y ago
Very funny

xyst 2y ago

Apple users today are just Windows users with even more entitlement. Wasn’t always like this, I think. Personally have seen the same with other projects and dealing with proprietary Apple APIs and their walled in garden is hard enough.

viraptor 2y ago

It sounds like he really got invested too much into what people wrote. > “Asahi is useless to me until I can use monitors over USB-C” “The battery life sucks compared to macOS” These are not even requests. These are objective statements he can either take note of for prioritisation or ignore. I can also say Asahi is useless to me until usb-c monitors support, but that's just my situation - there's no bad faith or request here. Previously that was the same for WiFi support. I wish there was some good model for maintainers of bigger projects to deal with this on a personal level. The bigger the project, the more people there will be with unmet requirements and that's just life. It literally can't be solved.

thomastjeffery 2y ago

People complain about things that they care about. People also don't usually have as much tact as we would like them to. I think the best way to deal with this is to just confidently say what you are and are not ready to get done. The social dynamic will always be this way, so we may as well take whatever criticism is useful, leave the rest behind, and move on.

FpUser 2y ago

>"I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one" Actually if this distro is my primary / only one I would like to be able to check CPU, GPU, etc. temperature. It is important to know if cooling is adequate or requires cleaning / repair. In any case Marcan would be way better off having thick skin. Users will always be assholes (well same is generally true about vendors).

CrimsonRain 2y ago

why not tag it as pre-alpha, not suitable for daily use? Saying smoothest linux experience on one side and expecting people to not expect basic features of the hardware working...how does that work? "Heavily under development and not ready for prime time use" should have been first line in readme and only reply to such feature request. So it sounds like they bit more than they could chew.

DyslexicAtheist 2y ago

from what I've seen of his grandstanding on the LKML suggesting to bully people on social media, I've lost all respect for the guy. He is a person in power considering all his social media clout, and this is how he uses it. I'm glad he realizes that it's time to sit back and reflect. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. He will be of much more use to the community, and more importantly himself after confronting his ego.

sph 2y ago
There are two types of VIP developers: those that stay in the shadows and do their work (think the Bram Moolenaars and Daniel Stenbergs) and those that seem to spend their entire time picking fights on social media and writing very emotionally charged blog posts that routinely reach the HN front page, because gossip and drama sells.