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.
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.
That's very true. I recommend some people to read "The Four Agreements", because that thin book has real potential to improve people's lives through active and passive communication.
Spoiler, but approximately 66% of the adult population make do without being able to maintain their own perspective independently of what their social circle tells them it is. I imagine that would make it extremely challenging to determine what someone else's perspective is. Especially if that perspective is being formed based on empiricism rather than social signalling.
And if we're making book recommendations, Non-Violent Communication is a gem of an idea.
[0] https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th...
stoics don't write multi-paragraph goodbye letters
Why you felt the need to add your comment, is a more apt question.
Eh, not really - "multi-paragraph goodbye letters" here refers to the overly dramatic fad that internet denizens sometimes engage in when they leave communities, and they tend to have a lot of whining.
Those types of goodbye letters are not the types of goodbye letters stoics would write.
> Why you felt the need to add your comment, is a more apt question.
If you were able to pick up so swiftly what the person I replied to was implying, you too should be able to have picked up that I replied because I disagreed with that implication.
The alpha male stoic carricutures, maybe. Real world stoics have not been above those.
>you too should be able to have picked up that I replied because I disagreed with that implication.
You could then just say that you disagree and state your case, without rudely asking why they posted it.
I doubt this, but would be curious to see a source.
> You could then just say that you disagree and state your case, without rudely asking why they posted it.
I didn't find it rude at all, and your reply was far less productive than my IMO neutral question. You took offense on behalf of someone else and inserted yourself when it was unnecessary and entirely reliant on your interpretation and perception. Now we're discussing your perceived slight instead of anything of substance.
Marcus Aurelius wrote extensive personal reflections in his "Meditations". Seneca wrote detailed letters to friends and family discussing philosophy, life, and death. Epictetus discussed death extensively in his Discourses, but sure, they were philosophical teachings rather than personal goodbyes.
They focus on acceptance and equanimity rather than formal farewells.
That said, "control what you can and forget the rest" is indeed stoicism, albeit simplified.
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.
What I found is being able have this "afterburner mode" alongside "advanced communications" capabilities gives the real edge in real life. So, this is why I wish he can build his soft skills.
These skills occupy different slots. You don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
The BSDs. You can fork a BSD. Maybe he could try to mainline into the BSD, but would probably face a similar battle with the BSDs. Right, one again, the benefit mainlining into linux, and there is some (maybe limited) support to include Rust, is you can narrow your scope. You don't need to worry as much about some things because they will just sorta work, I am thinking like upper layers of the kernel. You have a CPU scheduler and some subsystems that, may not be as optimized for the hardware, but at least it is something and you can focus on other things before coming around to the CPU scheduler. You can fork a BSD, but most would probably consider it a hard fork. I also don't think any of the BSDs have developers who are that interested in brining in Rust. Some people have mentioned it, but as far as I know, nothing is in the works to mainline any kind of Rust support in the BSD kernels. So he would probably meet similar resistance if he tried to work with FreeBSD. OpenBSD isn't really open to Rust at all.
If Rust is the point you get up from the bed in the morning, why don't you focus on Redox and make it the new Linux? Redox today is much more than Linux was in 1991 so it's not like you would be starting from scratch.
You're probably not as good as Linus in, well, anything related to this field really. The only way to find out whether you actually are is to do the work. Note that also he spent a lot of time whining to people who were perceived as the powerful in the field. But in addition to whining he went and did the work and proved those people wrong.
Mind you, I'm a PHP developer by day, so this Rust-vs-C debate and memory management stuff is not something I've had experience with personally, but the "Rust is magical" section towards the bottom seems like a good summary of why the developer chose to use Rust.
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789940
I personally fall a little more on the side of the Linux kernel C devs. Inter-oping languages and such does bring in a lot of complications. And the burden is on the Rust devs to prove it out over the long haul. And yes, that is an uphill battle, and it isn't the first time. Tons of organizations go through these pains. Being someone who works in a .NET shop, transitioning from .NET Framework to .NET core slowly is an uphill battle. And that's technically not even a language change!
But I do agree, Redox would probably less friction and a better route if you want to get into OS dev on an already existing project and be able to go "balls to the walls" with Rust. But you also run into, Redox just has a lot less of everything. That is just because it's a small project.
«Undocumented» – yes, but «hostile» is an emotionally charged term that elicits a strong negative reaction; more significantly, though, it constitutes a flagrant misrepresentation of the veritable truth as stipulated within the resignation letter itself:
When Apple released the M1, I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project. The technical challenges were the same as my console homebrew projects of the past (in fact, much bigger), but this time, the platform was already open - there was no need for a jailbreak, and no drama and entitled users who want to pirate software to worry about.
Also, if you had a chance to reverse-engineer a closed source system, you would have known that «hostile» has a very specific meaning in such a context as it refers to a system that has been designed to resist the reverse-engineering attempts. No such resistance has been observed on the Apple Silion computing contraptions.
I think they even left a "direct boot from image" (or something similar) mode as a small door to allow Asahi Linux development, if not to accelerate a little bit without affecting their own roadmap. Even Hector tweeted about it himself!
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.
This really depends on what you work on. And how good the managers are on your team. I talked to a manager at Google once about how he saw his job. He said he saw his entire job as getting all of that stuff out of the way of his team. His job was to handle the BS so his team could spend their time getting work done.
This has been my experience in small projects and in very well run projects. And in immature projects - where bugs are cheap and there’s no code review. In places like that, I’m programming more like 60% of the time. I love that.
But Linux will never be like that ever again. Each line of committed code matters too much, to too many people. Is has to be hard to commit bad code to Linux. And that means you’ve gotta do a lot of talking to justify your code.
I did some work at the IETF a few years ago. It’s just the same there - specs that seem right on day 1 take years to become standards. Look at http2. But then, when that work is done, we have a standard.
As the old saying goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Personally I like going fast. But I respect the hell out of people who work on projects like Linux and chrome. They let us go far.
Someone who is in a management position, has good political skills and good connections will be way more efficient at doing some of this non-programming work.
This is something that even C-levels forget. Something that takes a CTO 2 minutes to do can take several months for a regular developer to achieve, and I have plenty of experience on and plenty of examples of that.
Perhaps "useless" was the wrong word the GP used. "valued" may be better.
It's fairly common for very useful/valuable code to be discarded because the engineer (or his management) failed to articulate that value to senior leaders as well as someone else who had inferior code.
All the while: You are correct, being able to produce anything that solves a problem is much more valuable than being able to talk about it. But in order to unlock the value (beyond solving your own problem) absolutely requires communication
I have written plenty of code that's stuck on this first step in my life, including some that went to the very same LKML we're talking about here right now. Some of those things have already been independently written again by other people who actually managed to go further than that.
These are all engineering tasks, and the longer you spend on a team/in a company, the more likely it is you provide more value by doing this than by slinging code. You become a repository of institutional knowledge to dispense.
Even before we started coding, there was an RFC written by us. We have talked about it, discussed it, ironed it out with the chief architects of the project. When everything made sense we started implementing it. Total coding hours is irrelevant, but it's small when compared all the planning and it's almost finished now.
The code needs to tap and fit into a specific place in the pipeline. Finding and communicating this place was crucial. The code is not. Because you can write the most sophisticated code in the most elegant way, but if you don't design and implement it to fit to the correct place, that code is toast, and the effort is a waste.
So yes, code might be the most enjoyable (and sometimes voluminous) part, but it's 5% of the job, by weight, at most.
If you can communicate it can be 99% of the value. Getting someone to write something to back it up is trivial in comparison.
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
- Linus TorvaldsPeople might also live their hobby dev experience better if they were really coding for themselves without any expectation except pushing the code to a repo. As a hobby dev, you don't have to make package, you don't have to have an issue tracker, you don't have to accept external contributions, you don't have to support your users if you aren't willing to have this on your shoulder. You don't even need a public git repo, you could just put a release tarball when release is ready on your personal website.
Yeah but FFS using email for patches when there are so much better ways of doing development with git? The Linux Foundation could selfhost a fucking GitLab instance and even in the event of GitLab going down the route of enshittification or closed-source they could reasonably take over the maintenance of a fork.
I get that the Linux folks want to stay on email to gatekeep themselves from, let's be clear, utter morons who spam on any Github PR/issue they can find. But at the same time it makes finding new people to replace those who will literally die out in the next decade or two so much harder.
This is not about spam, server management or GitLab/Gitea/whatever issue. This is catering to most diverse work methods, and removing bottlenecks and failure points from the pipeline. GitLab is down, everybody is blocked. Your mail provider is failing? It'll be up in 5 minutes tops, or your disk is full probably, go handle it yourself.
So Occam's razor outlaws all the complex explanations for mail based patch management. The answer is concise in my head:
> Mailing list is a great archive, it's infinitely simpler and way more robust than a single server, and keeps things neatly decentralized, and as designed.
This is a wind we can't control, I for one, am not looking and kernel devs and say "What a bunch of laggard luddites. They still use e-mail for patch management". On the contrary, I applaud them for making this run for this many years, this smoothly. Also, is it something different what I'm used to? Great! I'll learn something new. It's always good to learn something new.
Because, at the end of the day, all complex systems evolve from much simpler ones, over time. The opposite is impossible.
Well until you deal with email deliverability issues, which are staggeringly widespread and random. Email were great to send quick patches between friends like you'd exchange a USB key for a group project. For a project the size of Linux? It doesn't scale at all. There is a reason why Google, Meta, Red Hat, and [insert any tech company here] doesn't collaborate by sending patches via email.
mail-based patch management is fine for smaller projects, but Linux kernel is too big by now.. it sure is amazing how they seem to make it work despite their scale, but it's kinda obvious by now, that some patches can go unnoticed, unprioritized, unassigned, ...
and open source is all about getting as many developers as possible to contribute to the development. if I contribute something and wait months to get it reviewed, it will deter me from contributing anything more, and I don't care what's the reason behind it. the same goes for if I contribute something and receive an argument between two or more reviewers whether it's the right direction or not and there's no argumentative answer from a supervisor of the project and this situation goes on for months...
[citation needed]
It's what "open source" enables, but it may not necessarily be a desired goal of a FLOSS project.
It's not really enough to state your case. You have to do the work.
On the surface, the kernel developers are productive enough. Feel free to do shadow work for a maintainer and keep your patch stack in Gitlab. It it can be shown the be more effective, lots of maintainers are going to be interested. It's not like they all work the same way!
They just have a least common denominator which is store-and-forward patch transport in standard git email format.
Everyone still has at least the base branch they're working on and their working branch on their machine, that's the beauty of working with Git. Even if someone decides to pull a ragequit and perma-wipe the server, when all the developers push their branches, the work is restored. And issues can be backed up.
> Also, is it something different what I'm used to? Great! I'll learn something new.
The thing is, it's harder and more difficult in a time that better solutions exist. Routinely, kernel developers complain about being overworked and onboarding of new developers to be lacking... one part of the cause certainly is that the Linux kernel is a massive piece of technology, and another one that the social conventions of the Linux kernel are very difficult, but the tooling is also very important - Ballmer had a point with "developers developers developers".
People work with highly modern tools in their day jobs, and then they see the state of Linux kernel tooling, and they say "WTF I'm not putting up with that if I'm not getting paid for it".
Or to use a better comparison... everyone is driving on the highway in the same speed, but one car decides to slow down, so everyone else overtakes it. The perpetual difficulties of many open source projects to accomodate changing times and trends - partially because a lot of small FOSS is written by people for their individual usage! - are IMHO one of the reasons why there is so much chaos in the FOSS world and many private users rather go for the commercial option.
...which doesn't matter at all.
The people in charge decided on their preferred ways of communication. You may believe that there are better ways out there, and I may even agree with you, but ultimately it's completely irrelevant. People responsible decided that this is what works for them and, to be honest, they don't even owe you an explanation. You're being asked to collaborate in this specific way and if you're unable to do it, it's on you. If you want to change it, work your way to become a person who decides on this stuff in the project, or convince the people already responsible. Notice how neither of those are technical tasks and that they don't depend on technical superiority of your proposed methods either.
If you approach it from the viewpoint that you have the solution and they are Luddites, you will influence no one and have no effect.
You are missing one point, namely that email is probably the only communication medium that's truly decentralized. I mean, on most email providers you can export your mailboxes and go to someone else. You can have a variety of email clients and ways to back up your mailboxes. No git clone, no specific mailbox or server is in any way special, I think Linus emphasized recently that they made efforts to ensure kernel.org itself is not special in any way.
Yes, I find Github's or Gitlab's UI, even with all enshittification by Microsoft and whatnot, better for doing code reviews than sight-reading patches in emails. And yet I cannot unsee a potential danger that choosing a service — any service! — to host kernel development would make it The Service, and make any migration way harder to do than what you have with email. Knowing life, I'd say pretty confidently that an outcome would be that there would be both mailing lists and The Service, both mandatory, with both sides grumbling about undue burdens.
Have you ever been in a project which had to migrate from, say, Atlassian's stack to Github, or from Github to Gitlab, or vice versa? Heck, from SourceForge + CVS/SVN to Github or similar? Those were usually grand endeavors for projects of medium size and up. Migrate all users, all issues, all PRs, all labels, test it all, and you still have to write code while it all is happening. Lots of back-and-forth about preserving some information which resists migration and deciding whether to just let it burn or spend time massaging it into a way the new system will accept it. Burnout pretty much guaranteed, even if everyone is cooperating and there is necessity.
But you could probably build tools on top of email to make your work more pleasant. The whippersnappers who like newer ways might like to run them.
They're not micro kernel! They're not TDD! They're not C++! They're not CVS! Not SVN! Not SCRUM! Not Gitlab!
Yet the project marches on, with a nebulous vision of doing a really useful kernel for everyone. Had they latched on any of the armchain expert criticism of how they're doing it wrong all these years we wouldn't be here.
The question is - how long will it march on? The lack of new developers for Linux has been a consistent topic for years now. Linus himself isn't getting younger, and the same goes for Greg KH, Ted Ts'o and other influential leads.
When the status quo scares off too many potential newcomers, eventually the project will either wither or too inexperienced people drive the project against a wall.
Why would he need to, he's already a young whippersnapper.
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.
It took them a while to, but they finally offer boards based on AMD chips.
I don't need an upgrade now, but I feel a RISC-V framework is feasible once I do.
Many ARM SOC are designed to run on battery only so the wireless packages and low power states are better, my AMD couldn't go below 400mhz.
But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
I hope to be able to run ARM on an unlocked laptop soon. I run a Chromebook as extra laptop with a MediaTek 520 chip and it's got 2 days battery life, AMD isn't quite there yet.
It's more nuanced than that. Apple effectively pulled a "Sony A7-III" move. Released something one generation ahead before everybody else, and disrupted everyone.
Sony called "A7-III" entry level mirrorless, but it had much more features even when compared to the higher-end SLRs of the era, and effectively pulled every other camera on the market one level down.
I don't think even they thought they'd keep that gap forever. I personally didn't think it either, but when it was released, it was leaps and bounds ahead, and forced other manufacturers to do the same to stay relevant.
They pulled everyone upwards, and now they continue their move. If not this, they also showed that computers can be miniaturized much more. Intel N100 and RaspberryPi/OrangePi 5 provides so much performance for daily tasks, so unimaginable things at that size are considered normal now.
It's just another "Apple integrating well" story.
Their SoC is huge compared to competitors because Apple doesn't have to make a profit selling a SoC, they profit selling a device + services so they can splurge on the SoC, splurging on the SoC plus being one node ahead is just "being good", the team implementing Rosetta are the real wizards doing "revolutionary cool shit" if anything
...plus, they have a whole CPU/GPU design company as a department inside Apple.
Not dissimilar to Sony:
Sony Imaging (camera division) designed a new sensor with the new capabilities of Sony Semiconductor (fab), and used their exclusivity to launch a new camera built on top of that new sensor. Plus, we shall not forget that Sony is an audiovisual integration powerhouse. They one of the very few companies which can design their DSPs, accompanying algorithms, software on top of it, and integrate to a single product they manufacture themselves. They're on par with Apple's integration chops, if not better (Sony can also horizontally integrate from Venice II to Bravia or Mics to Hi-Fi systems, incl. everything in between).
The gap also didn't survive in Sony's case (and that's good). Nikon and Fuji uses Sony's sensor fabs to use their capabilities and co-design sensors with the fab side.
Canon had to launch R series, upscale their sensor manufacturing chops. Just because Sony "integrated well" when looked from your perspective.
Sony is also not selling you the sensor. It's selling you the integrated package. From sensor to color accuracy to connectivity to reliability and service. A7-III has an integrated WiFi and FTP client to transfer photos. A9 adds an Ethernet jack for faster transfers. Again, integration within and between ecosystems.
Compared to the incremental changes we've seen the previous 10 years before it arrived on AMD/Intel space, it was revolutionary.
What they did doesn't matter. Even if they merely took an intel laptop chip and stuck a chewing gum on it, the result was evolutionary.
So much so, that it put a fire under Intel's ass, and mobilized the whole industry to compete. For years after it came out the goal was to copy it and beat it.
What did you expect to call "revolutionary"? Some novel architecture that uses ternary logic? Quantum chips?
That is part of the challenge he chose to take on.
> Headwinds from users, because of the stripped down experience.
Users can be ignored. How much you get users to you is your own choice.
> 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
You don't have to upstream. Again, it's not the kernel team that chose to add support for "hostile" hardware so don't try to make this their problem.
> and who apparently have some sort of schism over rust support?
Resistance when trying to push an entirely different language into an established project is entirely expected. The maintainers in question did not ask for people to add Rust to the kernel. They have no obligation to be welcoming to it.
> Be a heck of a lot easier if at least one of them was on your side.
Except for the users all the conflicts are the direct result from the choice of work. And the users are something you have to choose to listen to as well.
Their boss, however, did ask for it, so yes, they do have an obligation to be welcoming to it.
"did ask for it" - did he? Because from my perspective it looks more like he gave the bone for corporations so they will shut up for rust in kernel. After some time it will end up "Sorry but rust did not have enough support - maintainers left and there were issues with language - well back to C"
I addressed your second point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43075508
With all the drama, I wouldn't be the least surprised if he soon withdraws that provisional acceptance.
> "A lot of people actually think we're somewhat too risk averse," said Torvalds. "So when it comes to Rust, it's been discussed for multiple years by now. It's getting to the point where real soon now, we will actually have it merged in the kernel. Maybe next release."…
> "Before the Rust people get all excited," the Linux kernel creator and chief said. "Right? You know who you are. To me, it's a trial run, right? We want to have [Rust's] memory safety. So there are real technical reasons why Rust is a good idea in the kernel…”
> “And hopefully, it works out, and people have been working on it a lot, so I really hope it works out…”
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/linus_torvalds_rust_l...
Last September he was still insisting he thinks the project will not fail, and he was not exactly subtle in his criticism of maintainers who refuse to engage with it in good faith.
> "Clearly, there are people who just don't like the notion of Rust, and having Rust encroach on their area.
> "People have even been talking about the Rust integration being a failure … We've been doing this for a couple of years now so it's way too early to even say that, but I also think that even if it were to become a failure – and I don't think it will – that's how you learn," he said.
> "So I see the whole Rust thing as positive, even if the arguments are not necessarily always [so]."…
> With impressive diplomacy, considering his outbursts of years past, Torvalds went on, "There's a lot of people who are used to the C model, and they don't necessarily like the differences... and that's ok.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/torvalds_talks_rust_i...
But yeah, I still don't think it's all that inaccurate: He may not have wanted it to fail, and still not think it's a technical failure... But socially? Still seems possible he'd be starting to think that while the Rust language per se is a technical success, all the drama surrounding the integration of it into Linux means that that is turning out to be a social failure.
(Or maybe I'm just projecting because that is what it looks like to me.)
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.
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 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 ;)
Otherwise he knows he's 6th in line.
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.
I got along great with the sales guys. They could understand that kind of thing.
Not when all the other P1 tickets are from other sales guys.
But at least now they're all fighting with each other, via your manager, so they're out of your hair.
This is when the underrated skill of saying NO pays off massive dividends. One long-term client once told me the thing he appreciated the most, compared to most other consultants, was that I wasn't afraid of pushing back on his requests and saying no (within reason). Probably the most valuable feedback I have ever received.
Obviously, there was some oversight from managers, but overall it worked pretty well.
Great idea about the priority queue.
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.
In projects where this is a problem, I've made an issue template that clearly requests all the stuff I think I'll need. There's a big note at the top of the template that says it's not optional and that if it isn't filled out fully, I'll close the issue without comment.
And then I do that, every time. Sometimes they fill it out and reopen, sometimes they don't. Either way, I don't end up wasting time trying to help people who don't respect my time.
Its quite difficult to ban someone from a public park, especially when they can just put on a new hat.
Its really easy to ban someone from a private park. Even if they do put on a new hat, when they get belligerent again you just revoke the renewal of their access pass.
Fair deals attract people with some money, but the almost-free only attract people who are forever broke, who live their life feeling entitled to everything being handed over to them.
this is always true with, at least a great many, people. it's related to choosey-beggar syndrome. it's a bug/glitch/feature in human psychology.
if you ever have the chance to be a property manager, never ever let someone move in a week early or pay a week later for free. never let your rent get drastically below market. when people aren't paying for something, it's incredibly common behavior to stop respecting it. it's like a switch flips and suddenly they are doing you the favor.
that's why in times past, offering or taking "charity" was considered impolite. but making a small excuse might be ok. say someone needs to stay an extra week after their lease was over, but was strapped for cash. instead of saying "sure you can stay one more week", say "well, you'd really be doing me a small favor staying in the place to watch for the extra week since it's empty anyway. how about i discount the rent by 50% for that week and amend the lease to take care of it."
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.
Does it have to be a meeting? Although it's about sales calls, I'm reminded of https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 )
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.
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
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.
Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Sounds like a great time to give them a refund because they didn’t get the product they thought they were getting.
Too passive aggressive? :)
When I want to give something away, I list it for some nominal fee like $10, then just tell them to keep it. Because when I used to list things for free, I got the dredges of society bothering me. Asking for delivery, asking me to hold it for 3 months til they can find a truck, cussing at me for saying no to both of these, cussing me because I sold it to someone else already, telling me long sob stories to guilt me. I've never had any of that happen when asking for money(except one guy wanted me to deliver it for $20, which was a fair-ish offer).
I wonder if that same 'pay but you'll get it back under the table' model could work for software? At least until the word got out, I guess.
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.
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.
The real answer is to either learn these skills or, as you suggest, delegate them. Hoping to find something that doesn't involve "all this mess" at all will be fruitless.
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.
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.
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.
Who's demanding a rewrite of Linux?
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.
People become vocal when they are pissed.
> 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.
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.
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...
Imo modern linux experience is much better than the situation you describe, at least as long as you use certain type of hardware. In the past it was definitely harder. But wrt asahi, I want the "luxury" of using an external monitor with my 13" macbook air, and sadly, while in the past x86 machines I put linux I would put some effort and get AMD mesa drivers to work, I cannot do that here. I respect the effort put in the asahi project, but calling it suitable for a daily driver is misleading, unless you specify exactly what sort of daily driver you mean. Stuff like using an external monitor is pretty basic in my book of daily usage.
In hindsight.
> [Linux] did become reliable over the years.
Might have gone the other way. And if it had, nobody would be surprised at that either, now.
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.
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".
I can't imagine then what's his problem. I don't get not 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
I think that might be the problem.
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.
>You need to both be able to ignore
> and be openminded enough to ...
I'm know it's pretty pointless to argue because we see the world in a different way. But realize the (quoted) requirements are you putting on the open source developer.
A developer without these skills will burn out.
> A developer without these skills will burn out.
And I think that's something that should be said more directly. If you want to do open source (as in become the provider of load bearing infrastructure): Then you really need to realise what you are getting yourself into. Would I like that to be different? Sure. Would I bet on that changing? Absolutely not.
And yes, that absolutely means you can either do open source as a hobby, then nobody should ever be willing to rely on the thing you are building (because you can just say "i've got better things to do than fixing the security bug you got") or you can attempt to get other people to use and rely on it, but then you have to find a way not to burn out.
You don't get negative feedback if you don't open communications channels for that.
This some next level philosophy pondering, thanks.
It’s called a Code of Conduct. It exists and is in use by many organisations, including several open-source projects.
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.
> “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.
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.
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).
"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.
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!