Comment by galoisscobi
10 months ago
> 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!
[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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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> (yes, this is direct from stoicism)
stoics don't write multi-paragraph goodbye letters
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> 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.
> Headwinds from Apple, who are indifferent to the project, stingy with documentation, and not inclined to reduce their own rate of change.
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.
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Another uphill battle that I haven't seen anyone mention is just how good mobile AMD chips got a year or so after the M1 release. I wouldn't buy a Mac to run Linux on it when I can buy a Lenovo with equally soldered parts that'll work well with the OS I wanna run already.
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Well, nobody ever said it wouldn’t feel uphill both ways.
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).
> Not realizing that is a sure road to burnout (and yes, I'm just as guilty of that myself).
Humans are shaped by experience. This is both a boon and a curse. I have been also been on the hot end of the stick and burned myself down, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. Understanding that I don't want to go through this anymore was the point I started to change.
> Collaborating on software development is a social activity and stuff like convincing maintainers to trust you and your approach is just as important part of it (if not more important) as writing code.
Writing the code is at most 5% of software development IME. This is what I always say to people I work with. I absolutely love writing code, but there are so many and more important activities around that, I can't just ignore them and churn out code.
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This. So very much this. If you burn bridges and then need them later, yeah, things are going to be 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.
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.
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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.
I understand. While I'm not as prolific as him, I've grown with systems which retrocomputing fans meticulously restore and use, so I had to do tons of free-wheeling peeking and poking.
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.
Why not develop a distro based on BSD/darwin kernel then?
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> Asahi Linux is similar, given how hostile and undocumented Apple Silicon is, […]
«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:
Which is consistent with marcan's multiple previous blog posts and comments on here. Porting Linux (as well as NetBSD, OpenBSD) onto Apple Silicon has been no different from porting Linux/*BSD onto SPARC, MIPS, HP-PA and other platforms.
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.
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It's simple statistics. With a large enough sample size, you're going to always have a few very loud outliers.
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.
This is every successful product, small, medium, large. I've never ever worked on a big corporate or small personal project and not experienced this.
The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority".
You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment you do your users become your opponent. None of those requests are entitled, the author has clearly already reached a point where they are antagonistic towards requests.
I 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 ;)
That's when they understand that they have to start fighting their peers and talking with the big boss to get their P1 ticket moved in front of the other P1 tickets.
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Good for them for at least understanding at that point. The typical response is to say "I get that, I really do—can you move this one to the front of the line for me?" and then maybe a vague threat like "I can talk to your manager if it would help".
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In my experience, when it's other people deciding the priority of your tasks (usually your boss), the distribution is 150 P1 tickets, 3 P2 tickets and 1 P3.
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.
When I worked support, they didn't even have a priority system (it was C2B, so there weren't necessarily enterprise customers. That did come later, with LiveChat and all it's joys). Instead, we had a 24hr expected turnaround and harder tickets would naturally filter to the top. Tickets that had reached near that point had a higher weight, which went towards your metrics/"leaderboard status". To dissuade gaming of the system, ongoing replies were assigned to an agent (you wouldn't give a half-assed reply and then hope for someone else to clean it up) and were exempted from the bonuses (so were one standard ["fresh"] ticket each).
Obviously, there was some oversight from managers, but overall it worked pretty well.
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.
Yes. I was developing some open source stuff before venturing to for-profit closed Source Software, and I was surprised that the paying customers were on average much nicer than those who got their stuff for free!
Great idea about the priority queue.
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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.
> Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly [...] hearing them out was part of the job
Does it have to be a meeting? Although it's about sales calls, I'm reminded of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 )
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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.
Thank you for Ardour btw, great piece of software although I still use Ableton from time to time, Ardour is taking over more and more parts for me :)
I've read your comments here (and elsewhere) for a long time, and I'm sure you'd have some great ideas or at least opinions about this, which is pretty relevant to what you just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537
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God how I hate these arguments. You have this especially with Gimp. "But my beloved multibillion company worth product can do X sooo much better and easier. Also it has 16bit bla bla bla." You don't say?!?!?!? Any tips how to get a thicker skin, or it grows on you over the years ? Also, thanks for Ardour. I am a hobby cellist and record sometimes myself using Ardour and to cut down samples for an app I am working on. I tried doing that with my iPhone which worked like crap. Yup!
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.
> you can make it faster
Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.
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.
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...
I am talking about lack of pretty standard features, not bugs. Having more users would not help there. And in general, you dont need a huge influx of users, and you definitely you dont get as much help from users who are not going to put at least some effort in the feedback they give. You want users that are conscious enough about what they are using to give useful feedback and/or support with donations. I am pretty sure that some people still are attracted to running an experimental version of linux.
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.
You can't shake out bugs for features that are not there. More users won't help, only more developers.
> unsurprisingly
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.
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.
> 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.
I always feel like I'm imposing, and I have to remind myself that there are people who are eager to hear what I have to say. I try to set up my issue reports with appropriate background, and I always volunteer to, for example, submit a PR for a documentation change if the resolution requires it. And I have had some of the most wonderful interactions with complete strangers who had an idea, built a tool for themselves, and found other people had the same need.
There's a broader topic of ... just be nice to people. It doesn't cost anything. It does reassure me that this universe has been struggling with this for decades upon decades--witness the Malvin and Jim scene in WarGames. "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively?"
It always surprises me how happy people are when you submit a bug report with example code which demonstrates the problem. Like, irrationally happy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right exactly. They're not tactful, but they also weren't in bad faith. Marcan should have taken 5 minutes to realize that he's the boss, he's the one doing the work, nobody is entitled to anything in free software and that if people want a feature sooner they can either fund the project or kick rocks. Anyone who's been in open source for over 2, definitely 3 understands this.
> I miss having free time where I can relax and not worry about the features we haven’t shipped yet. I miss making music. I miss attending jam sessions. I miss going out for dinner with my friends and family and not having to worry about how much we haven’t upstreamed. I miss being able to sit down and play a game or watch a movie without feeling guilty.
This is the big problem really. He should have just turned down his work hours to a regular 40 a week, asked for more donations to pay more people and asked for more volunteer help. And honestly, probably therapy.
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.
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.
> 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".
Where is an example of this "false advertising"?
Actually they have a device support page: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
I can't imagine then what's his problem. I don't get offended by people that can't even read. I don't normally call them people let alone entitled :\ Set up a bot that links them the device support page, and problem solved? I don't get it
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It is open-source no one is going to serve you or care for your time. Take it or leave it.
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.
> 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).
I think I've said this before, but 'free' seems to attract the worst of humanity.
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.
> I PAID FOR THIS YOU MUST FIX IT!!!1!
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? :)
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> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
>"I can’t even check my CPU temperature” (yes, I seriously got that one"
Actually if this distro is my primary / only one I would like to be able to check CPU, GPU, etc. temperature. It is important to know if cooling is adequate or requires cleaning / repair.
In any case Marcan would be way better off having thick skin. Users will always be assholes (well same is generally true about vendors).
why not tag it as pre-alpha, not suitable for daily use? Saying smoothest linux experience on one side and expecting people to not expect basic features of the hardware working...how does that work?
"Heavily under development and not ready for prime time use" should have been first line in readme and only reply to such feature request.
So it sounds like they bit more than they could chew.
I have been maintaining open source projects, and really: users of open source projects suck. They get your work for free, but it's not enough; they have to be assholes on top of that.
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.
Totally. Though I am pretty confident I don't get 10 people saying thank you for one cussing me out :-).
People become vocal when they are pissed.
Let's be honest it's still pretty useless.
People complain about things that they care about. People also don't usually have as much tact as we would like them to.
I think the best way to deal with this is to just confidently say what you are and are not ready to get done. The social dynamic will always be this way, so we may as well take whatever criticism is useful, leave the rest behind, and move on.
Never ever give away anything for free if you intend to support it is an evergreen advice.
Selling ads? Using it as a gateway to a commercial product? Selling support? Have some genius business plan that allows you to make money in the future? Fine, give it away no strings attached but expecting that users will be grateful is a mistake developers keep repeating. The free users are just as entitled, even more entitled as they don’t have a price tag for your efforts and don’t have a document specifying what are your obligations so they can assume scope of entitlements anyway they wish.
Since you gave it for free, you can’t refund an unhappy customers to make it go away. If it looks like a product, You will be stuck with people who think they did their part by using your products and you failed them. Some may make it a full time job to take a revenge on this injustice.
I’m not even sure that these users are at fault, you actually took something in exchange(like fame, street cred etc) and you are not delivering your part.
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.
You refund them and it’s solved. You don’t have that option with free users.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No good deed goes unpunished.
> 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.
Very funny