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stalkers who harassed and attacked me and my family
Wtf is wrong with these people?
entitlement and/or astro-turfing imo
kiwifarmers got on his ass
Ikr
That’s really too bad… They are a super talented developer and they were doing something really cool, and making great progress too.
But if they were doing Asahi Linux for fun as a hobby, and if it isn’t fun anymore for a variety of reasons, then you really can’t blame them.
I’m not sure if there is a “right” or “wrong” here, as this is just one person’s side of the story that acknowledges, but mostly glosses over, the possibility that they made mistakes or behaved badly at times too.
But I can absolutely understand the basic concept of burning out because you don’t think your hard work is being appreciated, because people are making hard things even harder for you, or because users on the internet let their excitement about a thing push them too far into being entitled.
Hopefully Marcan can find some time to relax and do fun and rewarding things with their time.
But if they were doing Asahi Linux for fun as a hobby, and if it isn’t fun anymore for a variety of reasons, then you really can’t blame them.
I have 0 knowledge about this project, so my statement here is just a general statement.
But if a developer collects donations for promising something, then this is not just “for fun”, but they do have a moral obligation to try doing a good job.
It seems they overfullfilled their obligations (but all I know about it, are the words of the developer). So, as said above, this is a general statement.
edit: lol you guys are funny, but maybe read my comment. I talked about “doing his best” and about “things they promised”. You really think it is okay to say “I will try project A, I need donations” and then go on a holiday with the donated money and do nothing else? Do you thing this attitude will get people to donate anything?
Donations do not obligate anyone to do anything. It’s a donation, not pay. They should be done out of appreciation for someone’s time and effort, or to help support any potential work the project decides to do. But never with the expectation that you’re owed something back for donating.
You’re probably right from a legal perspective, but the difference between “donation” and “salary” is pretty murky in this context.
If this person was given a grant or funding via a kickstarter or something I would agree with the obligation idea, but donations are exactly that, a voluntary gift to the dev for the work they have done so far and may continue to do in the future. There are no “moral obligations” to continue the project.
You really think it is okay to say “I will try project A, I need donations” and then go on a holiday with the donated money and do nothing else?
Yes. A donation is a donation, fullstop.
Would I feel good or morally okay doing such a thing? Absolutely no way. I acknowledge that internal inconsistency. If someone gives me something, I feel obligation to give back… simple as that.
Objectively speaking though, a donation is not a contract, and to expect a donation to have future influence is a messy method of doing business that should be viewed with a pretty critical eye. If a person giving money wants an obligation, they should pursue a contract… If they don’t care what happens after they give the money but just want to show support or appreciation, that’s where donations shine.
If I gave a donation to my favorite videogame dev, but then 2 hours later they stopped supporting that game, I’d still be happy I showed them support for what they had given me so far. I believe retroactively being unhappy about giving a donation shouldn’t cast the receiver in a bad light, and that it’s the giver that didn’t understand what they were doing and what the potential outcomes were.
Wow. The entitlement… maybe learn what a donation means
I’m not surprised by this.
The general attitude around R4L is that it’s largely unneeded and for every 1 person actively working against the project, there are 10 saying either “waiting and seeing if it works is the right decision” or “if rust is so good they should prove it.”
So as a R4L developer you’re expected by the community to fight an uphill battle with basically no support on your side.
We will likely keep having developers on that project continue to burn out and leave until the entire thing collapses unless the decision is made ahead of time to cancel the project.
Every time I read any news about Rust for Linux I leave disappointed by the entire kernel community.
I’m not sure why they feel it’s Linus’ responsibility to make Rust happen in the kernel. I’m certainly not happy someone is being harassed, but none of this is the fault of the Linux Foundation or the people that have been working on the kernel for decades.
If Rust is going to happen, then it’ll happen. Or fork it and make a Rust Linux with blackjack and hookers, and boy, will everyone left behind feel silly that they didn’t jump on the bandwagon. But nobody has to make your dreams their focus or even interact with it if they don’t want to. And these social media outbursts aren’t accomplishing what they think they’re accomplishing.
If Rust is going to happen, then it’ll happen.
How can it happen if individual maintainers say they’ll do everything in their power to keep Rust out of the kernel? There’s fundamentally no way forward. The R4L devs already gave every commitment they could, but some maintainers fundamentally don’t want it.
And before anyone brings it up: no, the maintainers weren’t asked to touch Rust code or not break Rust code or anything else.
Fact is Rust isn’t ready for every part of the kernel. C/Rust interop is still a growing pain for Linux and troubleshooting issues at the boundary require a developer to be good at both. It’s an uphill battle, and instead of inciting flame wars they could have fostered cooperation around the parts of the kernel that were more prepared. While their work is appreciated and they are incredibly talented, the reality is that social pressures are going to dictate development. At the end of the day software is used by people. Their expectations are not law, but they do need addressed to preserve public opinion.
Again: what cooperation is possible when the maintainer says “I’ll do everything in my power to keep Rust out of the kernel”? When they NACK a patch outside of their Subsystem?
Can a maintainer really NACK any patch they dislike? I mean I get that Hellwig said he won’t merge it. Fine. What if for example Kroah-Hartman says “whatever, I like it” and merges it nonetheless in his tree?
Yes, but asking him in this case was basically a courtesy, the code isn’t going into anything he manages. He can reject it, but that’s an opinion, not a decision. It can still be merged if the regular maintainer (or someone senior like Linus himself) approves.
Can you quote where that was said?
I’ve been following this debate for a bit and as far as I can tell it’s not so much that they’ll do what they can to keep rust out but more to make sure that the people who want to develop in rust are the ones who end up maintaining that part of the code and not the current maintainers.
Sure: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250131075751.GA16720@lst.de/
I accept that you don’t want to be involved with Rust in the kernel, which is why we offered to maintain the Rust abstraction layer for the DMA coherent allocator as a separate component (which it would be anyways) ourselves.
Which doesn’t help me a bit. Every additional bit that the another language creeps in drastically reduces the maintainability of the kernel as an integrated project. The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language complely breaks this. You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this.
Can’t get more explicit than this.
I’m not placing blame on the Linux Foundation, Linus, or anyone else for that matter. However, I believe that if Linus has publicly endorsed the use of Rust in the kernel, that decision is already largely set in motion. On the other hand, if the community collectively opposes the integration of Rust with C and no action is taken to address these problems, and everyone say no, then there is little to no reason to make the initial statement.
Much of the work being produced by Rust developers seems to struggle, often because it’s not made in C and because of maintainers saying “No I don’t want any rust code near my C code”.
I recognize that there are various technical factors influencing this decision, but ultimately it was the creator’s choice to support it.
It’s also his legitimate choice to wait. He can’t see the best way forward and is deciding to wait on his decission or let the community decide instead of him. As much as we like to think of him as autocrat in some way, he respects people that work on kernel and he respects their time. The smartest move is often to wait on a decision. And even if it’s not a smartest move in this case, it can still be better than making a wrong decission that will demoralize the community even more.
I’m not sure why they feel it’s Linus’ responsibility to make Rust happen in the kernel.
That’s not what’s being said here, as far as I can tell. Linus is not expected to somehow “make Rust happen”. But as a leader, he is expected to call out maintainers who block the R4L project and harass its members just because they feel like it. Christoph Hellwig’s behavior should not be allowed.
I’m not saying Marcan is necessarily correct, to be clear. It might well be that Linus chose to handle the issue in a quieter way. We can’t know whether Linus was planning on some kind of action that didn’t involve him jumping into the middle of the mailing list fight, eg contacting Christoph Hellwig privately. I’m merely pointing out that maybe you misunderstood what Marcan is saying.
Or fork it and make a Rust Linux with blackjack and hookers, and boy, will everyone left behind feel silly that they didn’t jump on the bandwagon.
That’s what they’re doing. But if you read the entire post carefully, he explains why maintaining a fork without eventually upstreaming it is problematic. And it’s not like they’re forcing their dream on the linux project, because the discussions have already been had and rust has officially been accepted into the kernel. So in the wider context, this is about individual maintainers causing friction against an agreed-upon project they don’t like.
deleted by creator
Or just boycott Linux and use Redox if you like Rust.
Thing is, there is already Rust in Linux, and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being sabotaged by C purists, who at this point should stop acting unprofessionally, or at the very least make their own “only C” fork if they disagree with his leadership so much.
And these social media outbursts aren’t accomplishing what they think they’re accomplishing.
I’m extremely technical, but not actively into Linux, though I’ve set up various distros dozens up times. These posts have driven me away from Linux in an extremely hard way - anyone with opinions like the Kernel team simply don’t deserve support, and Linus is clearly past his prime and making bad decisions. This has shown me that Linux is going to (likely already has) slowly stop improving due to its explicitly anti-progress leadership. Until a fork with good leaders manages to take a real market share, the OS will stagnate.
I’m sure this is a minority opinion, but to claim that the social media blitz hasn’t had its intended effect is objectively false. Fuck the kernel team.
Speaking of his Wii homebrew work,
Most people using our software just wanted to play pirated games (something we did not support, condone, or directly enable)
He wasn’t on whatever team that released a tool that asked “Oh hey just asking do you intend to run pirated games? Just need to know for setup” then soft bricking the console if you say yes?
Today, it is practically impossible to survive being a significant Linux maintainer or cross-subsystem contributor if you’re not employed to do it by a corporation. An interviewer to the Linux dev that’s mentioned in the article: “So what did you do next to try to convince the Linux kernel devs of the need for more focus on end-users?”
I appears as if Linux is a nest that is not built with a consistent set of user-centric principles. Instead, it seems that each part of the nest is built with a specific corporation or project in mind.
Assuming I’m right that Linux is built with project-based thinking and not product-based thinking, I do wonder what a user-centric Linux or another user-centric FLOSS OS would be like, an OS that is so smoothly built that users come to think of it not as an OS for tech-savvy people, but an obvious alternative that you install immediately after getting a computer.
If Linux is indeed built with project-based thinking, then I wonder why that is. The uncharitable explanation is that someone doesn’t want Linux to have a MacOS-like smooth and gorgeous experience. If you don’t think MacOS is smooth and gorgeous, I’ll address that.
I know some people have suffered immensely with Apple products not only because Apple builds devices that can’t be repaired, but because of things simply not working. However, there are many people who love Apple. That’s the kind of passionate advocacy that I would love to see in Linux, and not just around freedom and value-based judgements. I want Linux to be thought of as the least-friction tool for professional or recreational use. I want people to think of Linux as gorgeous and usable.
Of course, we can apply Hanlon’s razor to this situation (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [ignorance or lack of skill or practice].”). Managing a product is difficult. Managing a community is difficult. When the nest’s design is not built by a team constantly seeking to care about users, but instead by a bunch of users pecking into the nest until their corner is shaped the way they want, it’s not surprising to see a lack of user-centricity.
Sima (Simona Vetter) quotes “Being toxic on the right side of an argument is still toxic, […]” while being toxic
I’d much rather see them commit their talent towards more open hardware. Apple hardware isn’t even that good.
I think it’s important to see these types of efforts, while I’ll never go out and buy a MacBook the effort isn’t wasted since it gives current users more freedom and future people buying used laptops more options for Linux compatible hardware.
Without a project like this, that hardware will end up being e-waste a lot sooner than it should be, when Apple drops support. At least to me I see an ethical and moral imperative for projects like this, but I also understand people’s grievances with Apple.
