> 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!
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":
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
>"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"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.
> 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.
Happened with actix, happened with serde, and now being threatened by kernel contributors. The perception seems at least somewhat based in reality.
> "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas."
This is just an incredibly odd thing to say. It's so obviously out of line that it seems like someone's joking around.
The Rust community (generally-speaking) just can't see why people have a visceral reaction against them, independent of its technical qualities. In all my years, I've not seen anything like it.
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.
Then entertain his question and tell us what is? Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation is his last resort, after spending years trying to upstream even trivial patches. You can eat your cake and have it too - you can’t say you want rust in the kernel and then sabotage any upstreaming efforts
Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o (https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]...) 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-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.
> And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false?
Many discussions online (and offline) suffer from a huge-group of people who just can't stop themselves from making their knee-jerk reactions public, and then not thinking about it more.
I remember the "Filesystem in Rust" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s) where there are people who misunderstand what the "plan" is, and argue against being forced to use Rust in the Kernel, while the speaker is literally standing in front of them and saying "no one will be forced to use Rust in the Kernel".
You can literally shove facts in someone's face, and they won't admit to being wrong or misunderstand, and instead continue to argue against some points whose premise isn't even true.
I personally don't know how to deal with this either, and tend to just leave/stop responding when it becomes clear people aren't looking to collaborate/learn together, but instead just wanna prove their point somehow and that's the most important part for them.
> 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.
Unfortunately OP has a valid point regarding Rust's lack of commitment to backwards compatibility. Rust has a number of things that can break you that are not considered breaking changes. For example, implementing a trait (like Drop) on a type is a breaking change[1] that Rust does not consider to be breaking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
[+] [-] galoisscobi|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] bayindirh|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prododev|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] freehorse|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bebop|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] viraptor|1 year ago|reply
> “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.
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bmacho|1 year ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] jeroenhd|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WD-42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] palata|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _zoltan_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrtksn|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tguinot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] latexr|1 year ago|reply
It’s called a Code of Conduct. It exists and is in use by many organisations, including several open-source projects.
[+] [-] rdtsc|1 year ago|reply
> 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-cfc3-4a26-98...
"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.
[+] [-] unclad5968|1 year ago|reply
Happened with actix, happened with serde, and now being threatened by kernel contributors. The perception seems at least somewhat based in reality.
[+] [-] panza|1 year ago|reply
This is just an incredibly odd thing to say. It's so obviously out of line that it seems like someone's joking around.
The Rust community (generally-speaking) just can't see why people have a visceral reaction against them, independent of its technical qualities. In all my years, I've not seen anything like it.
[+] [-] subjectsigma|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nrabulinski|1 year ago|reply
Then entertain his question and tell us what is? Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation is his last resort, after spending years trying to upstream even trivial patches. You can eat your cake and have it too - you can’t say you want rust in the kernel and then sabotage any upstreaming efforts
[+] [-] nindalf|1 year ago|reply
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-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.
[+] [-] diggan|1 year ago|reply
Many discussions online (and offline) suffer from a huge-group of people who just can't stop themselves from making their knee-jerk reactions public, and then not thinking about it more.
I remember the "Filesystem in Rust" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s) where there are people who misunderstand what the "plan" is, and argue against being forced to use Rust in the Kernel, while the speaker is literally standing in front of them and saying "no one will be forced to use Rust in the Kernel".
You can literally shove facts in someone's face, and they won't admit to being wrong or misunderstand, and instead continue to argue against some points whose premise isn't even true.
I personally don't know how to deal with this either, and tend to just leave/stop responding when it becomes clear people aren't looking to collaborate/learn together, but instead just wanna prove their point somehow and that's the most important part for them.
[+] [-] cornstalks|1 year ago|reply
Unfortunately OP has a valid point regarding Rust's lack of commitment to backwards compatibility. Rust has a number of things that can break you that are not considered breaking changes. For example, implementing a trait (like Drop) on a type is a breaking change[1] that Rust does not consider to be breaking.
[1]: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/til-removing-an-explicit-drop-...
[+] [-] Topgamer7|1 year ago|reply
> 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|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] titmouse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Octoth0rpe|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jazzyjackson|1 year ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] freetime2|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dagmx|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnthrowaway0315|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zoogeny|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] imiric|1 year ago|reply
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/[email protected]...
[+] [-] lenova|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|1 year ago|reply
Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel
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
[+] [-] silisili|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ThatGuyRaion|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gsck|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mizza|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] -__---____-ZXyw|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] weinzierl|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 999900000999|1 year ago|reply
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.