[galoisscobi]

> 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!

[bayindirh]

[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.

[e40]

100% agree.

For the last few years, I've been saying the following regularly (to friends, family and coworkers): communication is the hardest thing humans will ever do. Period.

Going to the moon, launching rockets, building that amazing app... the hardest thing of all is communicating with other people to get it done.

As a founder (for 40+ years and counting) I manage a lot of different type of people and communication failures are the largest common thread.

Humans have a very, very tough time assuming the point of view of another. That is the root of terrible communication, but assumptions are right up there as a big second.

On the Marcan thing... I just want to say, control what you can and forget the rest (yes, this is direct from stoicism). Users boldly asking for features and not being grateful? Just ignore them. Getting your ego wrapped up in these requests (because that's what it is, even if he doesn't want to admit it), is folly.

I contributed to Marcan for more than a year. I was sad to see the way it ended. I wish him well.

[michaelt]

> 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.

Right - but it kinda sounds like he's facing headwinds in a lot of different directions.

Headwinds from Apple, who are indifferent to the project, stingy with documentation, and not inclined to reduce their own rate of change.

Headwinds from users, because of the stripped down experience.

Headwinds from the kernel team, who are in the unenviable situation of having to accept and maintain code they can't test for hardware they don't own; and who apparently have some sort of schism over rust support?

Be a heck of a lot easier if at least one of them was on your side.

[seba_dos1]

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).

[Scaevolus]

Marcan's career as a developer includes lots of development on hostile systems where he's jailbreaking various consoles to allow homebrew.

Asahi Linux is similar, given how hostile and undocumented Apple Silicon is, but it has a great amount of expectations of feature completeness and additional bureaucracy for code changes that really destroys the free-wheeling hacker spirit.

[Salgat]

It's simple statistics. With a large enough sample size, you're going to always have a few very loud outliers.

[javier2]

Yeah, I want to give them accolades for the great work they did.

I just wanted to also add that users will be users. Once its out, there will be endless posts about "why X" and "why not Y". No matter what you do, lots of people are going to be displeased. Its just the way things go. I hope he will want to pick it up again after some time.

[prododev]

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.

[duxup]

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 ;)

[anonzzzies]

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.

[lasereyes136]

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

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.

[timewizard]

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.

[manquer]

> you can make it faster

Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.

[freehorse]

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]

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...

[bebop]

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]

> 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.

[UncleEntity]

It always surprises me how happy people are when you submit a bug report with example code which demonstrates the problem. Like, irrationally happy.

[aezart]

I think I kind of get it. By the time someone actually gets to the point of filing an issue report, they are at the end of their rope. They have tried everything they can think of. They have googled and found no one else having the same problem, or fixes that don't work, or people saying "why would anyone need that feature". They feel like they're being gaslit, their time is being wasted, and that the developers are intentionally antagonizing them. And then the form to submit the issue has way too many fields and comes across as very adversarial.

That's certainly how I felt when trying to get my drawing tablet to work properly under Linux Mint, although in my case I skipped filing an issue and just gave up and went back to Windows.

[viraptor]

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.

[LudwigNagasena]

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]

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.

[georgemcbay]

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]

Its users misunderstanding the work required.

Basically, making linux work on Apple hardware is a pretty hard task, including a shitload of reverse engineering.

When a user decides to try it, and finds a lot of features missing, they are completely unaware of the work required to get it into that state, and just think they should have the readily available features.

[bmacho]

> 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]

Where is an example of this "false advertising"?

[timeon]

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

[jeroenhd]

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.

[richrichardsson]

> Open source attracts some of the very worst users

I don't think it's even just that, it seems to be something about the price.

I work on a piece of closed-source free software, and we consistently get support requests from unbelievably entitled assholes. The worst of them are the ones that have some technical knowledge; they will not only demand things be fixed or implemented, they make completely erroneous statements about how easy it would be to fix/implement with the conviction that they are 100% correct, with a level of arrogance that is impossible to fathom how they could have written their email with a straight face.

The support requests we receive for a paid offering from the same company are 99% of time much more pleasant people (of course there are the, "I PAID FOR THIS YOU MUST FIX IT!!!1!" on occasions, but they're a definite minority).

[seba_dos1]

> 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.

[sertraline]

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.

[angst_ridden]

In the early aughts, I spent a lot of time writing and maintaining Open Source software. I burned out on that because of rude users. I had one guy track me down offline and phone me at all hours to demand that I drop everything and fix a bug for him. When I pointed out that my day job came first because I have to pay bills, he went on an online screed accusing me of holding him hostage unless he paid for fixes and listing my cell number so people could "encourage me to be a better developer."

In those days, I was part of a core development team for a project with a fairly large community. A few bad users and a few bad development team members is all it takes to poison something like that.

Now I barely even contribute to Open Source projects even when I fix them for my own uses.

[megous]

Depends on the project. I have found Pinephone users quite nice overall as a kernel developer.

Anyway, if your project involves convincing hundreds of maintainers to increase their cognitive/work load in order to include your fancy new foreign workflow breaking language into their project, you have to expect pushback.

[account42]

> Open source attracts some of the very worst users.

This has not been my experience. Perhaps consider that the problem is not the users.

> the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust

On the other hand, users that demand you rewrite the project in their favorite language or otherwise accomodate their preferences over your own are pretty annoying.

[WD-42]

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]

> 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.

[FpUser]

>"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]

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.

[palata]

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]

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.

[_zoltan_]

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

[thomastjeffery]

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.

[mrtksn]

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]

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.

[DyslexicAtheist]

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]

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.

[segmondy]

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.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

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.

[xyst]

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.

[tguinot]

No good deed goes unpunished.

[latexr]

> 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]

Very funny