this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Passing the torch on Asahi Linux - Asahi Linux (asahilinux.org)
submitted 5 days ago by diamat@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] thatsnothowyoudoit@sh.itjust.works 32 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Have it on my M1 MacBook Air and the experience is solid. Sad to see one of the original crew gone. Reading his blog makes it sound like he’s burned out again - it was sad to read both for him and also sad because his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? That’s one of major selling point of the hardware platform. Surprised users wanted external display support? “Can’t you just be happy with what I gave you?” Bit of a strange take that makes me think he probably needs a long break away from something that’s become both too personal and toxic. I’m saying this because I’ve been there and can empathize.

But hey - grateful this project exists. It means Apple Silicon Macs have a much more open future.

[–] kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? ... Surprised users wanted external display support?

I think this misconstrues his point: he was talking about a subset of users ("entitled users"), not calling all the users entitled.

To me, it seemed less that he was surprised users wanted certain features, more that he was burned out by the feature requests that spent time expressing personal grievances, making demands, or getting mad about the project's pace. I understand that might come off as him being overly-sensitive, but I absolutely see why a constant cascade of FRs written like demands instead of no-BS questions would wear down on someone, especially while they're simultaneously trying to deal with upstreaming.

he needs a long break away from something that's become both too personal and toxic

I totally agree here though, I just hope that this whole fiasco isn't written off as the result of some vague burn-out. There really does need to be some change in kernel maintainer authority structure and the culture. That can only really happen if someone respected (e.g. Linus) makes some moves to encourage more cooperation/openness from certain C maintainers, and helps put in place better guidelines for how Rust contributions should be handled. It's simply too disorganized right now, and that makes it too easy for individuals with power to let their egos get in the way of good progress.

[–] thatsnothowyoudoit@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I have to respectfully disagree about misconstruing his point. From his blog post:

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…)

This points to someone who did a thing because it spoke to them on a “shiny, complex, technical problem” level but without any deep understanding about what those who might use it understand the end goals to be. If I wanted Linux on a laptop with x86 battery life, well that’s mostly a solved problem and that platform has ample support for external displays and connectivity.

So while I truly empathize with Martin feeling “burned out from dealing with entitled users” - having managed a very popular technical open source projects in the past - it’s still indicative of an impedance mismatch between his goals and what others might reasonably infer are the end goals for a project like this.

Again, it sucks because it doesn’t have to be this way. We could all act less entitled. But I also don’t think Martin is all victim here - at the very least he’s also victim of his own expectations. As we all often are - myself first and foremost.

I remember getting on a call with a particularly aggrieved open source contributor who claimed, in no uncertain terms, that it was our duty to take any and all PRs thrown at the project, no matter how poor they were, or how problematic they were to maintain. Again, I think most of us would agree that’s unreasonable, but there it was, stated without irony, and to my face.

It would start to eat at anyone. So again, I’m not faulting Martin here, I’m just expressing some surprise at his own surprise for what seem like perfectly reasonable requests and ones the team did very well to address directly and clearly on Asahi’s main page.

[–] kellenoffdagrid@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 hours ago

Okay, I think I understand your point better. While I still think his perspective on demanding users is pretty reasonable, I agree (and didn't make clear enough) that Martin's reaction here comes off less-measured than it should've. He definitely isn't all victim, he's stoked some flames and not done his part to de-escalate on many occasions, that's for sure.

This whole saga really is a shame, the guy clearly is talented, and there certainly are issues with how the Rust4Linux integration has been handled. I really hope things can improve systemically here.

Out of curiosity, what were some of the projects you managed? Much respect for your open source work, shit's not easy.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I would have figured the whole point of the project is getting to feature parity, right? It makes it a harder sell if you lose a bunch of them when migrating to Linux.

[–] thatsnothowyoudoit@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 days ago

That’s my feeling too.

And I’ll keep surporting them financially whether they get there or not.

But the whole “users act entitled by [insert basic feature]” leads me to believe other issues are clouding Martin’s judgement.

It’s a really wonderful project and it’s great to see the rest of the team deciding to use this event to build an even more resilient organization.

[–] Botzo@lemmy.world 42 points 5 days ago

I wish them luck and hope they can find better ways to work with the existing maintainers.

[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 25 points 5 days ago (5 children)

As a solid outsider, this whole Rust thing seems like it keeps simmering under the surface in a way that could one day boil over and seriously damage the entire Linux project.

I don’t have a machine capable of running Asahi today, but I also don’t feel like I need it now. Reading this and reading marcan’s resignation makes me feel like I should find some way to chip in to Asahi now so that whenever Apple eventually stops supporting my hardware, Asahi will hopefully still be there and ready to keep the hardware going. I figure I probably have about 6 years of Apple support, but I’m also suspecting Apple might support the ARM hardware longer than they ever did Intel or PowerPC, so I might have even more time.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 20 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

... Asahi will hopefully still be there and ready to keep the hardware going. I figure I probably have about 6 years of Apple support ...

i used to use & contribute to linux/foss projects for ppc architectured macs and it took years for them to be fully supported at the same level that intel architectured users enjoyed; chipping in now is the only way that something like asahi is ready to take over once apple inevitably leaves you out in the cold like it did its ppc (and soon intel) users.

they have excellent hardware and it would be a shame to throw it away or allow it to collect dust when you can't get 100% utility out of it simply because your options aren't developed enough at the time you need them.

[–] notanapple@lemm.ee 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You are just being silly, there is no way its going to "seriously damage the entire Linux project". There is nothing too technical about the whole R4L drama (esp. the recent one), its mostly political opposition to Rust from some C folks. We have seen this before in Linux (Wayland/X11, systemd/sysv, etc.).

[–] notabot@lemm.ee 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The problem is that those issues have, and continue to, cause damage to the Linux project. Good maintainers have been hounded out, or simply given up, and bad blood exists where it absolutely shouldn't. You're right that much of it is political, although that usually stems from deep technical differences backed up by corporate encouragement. Political turmoil can be as damaging, if not moreso, than technical differences. At least technical differences can usually be resolved technically, politics is infinitely more nuanced.

From Marcan's description, the way certain people treated him was absolutely unacceptable, although I've no doubt they'd describe things very differently. I hope the whole kernel team, maintainers and contributers, can find a way to work through these differences and work more harmoniously before more members end up burnt out, frustrated and bitter.

[–] notanapple@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago

Yeah the whole situation really sucks. Im a big fan of both marcan and linux so its just sad how it all ended. But Im hopeful the R4L project will be successful despite these setbacks. Some of the first rust drivers are really close to landing and I think once that happens, the dust will mostly settle as hopefully most of the things around rust would have been figured out by then. Even this situation led to some improvements like the R4L policy (and also brought the issue to greater public scrutiny). Though the drama probably won't end there, especially if rust starts making in to the core kernel (thus start being required for building the kernel). That is probably going to be the final obstacle; if rust makes it to the core kernel code, I think the R4L project will have succeeded.

[–] commander@lemmings.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Make sure you never buy apple hardware again.

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Really?

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1396740-apple-adds-feature-in-macos-121-that-only-benefits-asahi-linux/

According to Hector Martin (Asahi Linux developer) making things easier for Linux developers is the only known reason Apple would have added this.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 0 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

That's really, really out of character for Apple.

But then, so was releasing seriously powerful computers.

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

The G4 had a hardware bit rotate function, and a 128 bit bus, meaning it could do 4 32-bit bit rotates per clock cycle. the Intel Pentium 4 needed to emulate that one instruction over 4 CPU cycles, and had a 32-bit bus. This made the G4 up to 64x faster than the top Intel chip at the time at certain tasks, like cracking rc5 on distributed.net, where G4 clusters absolutely dominated the top ranks.

Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines - https://blogs.distributed.net/2002/09/25/00/00/bovine/

Apple has been known to release powerful hardware.

[–] erock@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The asahi project shouldn’t even exit with Apples purse, this is their job as far as I care. To be honest I would never use asahi for that reason.

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 2 points 5 days ago

Linux is what keeps my Macs alive 🤭

But this is good thinking

Think like jqubed

Donate in your future

See far

Peace

[–] erock@lemmy.ml -3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I agree. For everyone’s sake they should rip Rust out and put all that effort into RedoxOS. There is way too much misalignment for this to be constructive.

[–] IsoSpandy@lemm.ee -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Our king Sir Torvalds has spoken. And hence let there be rust in the kernel

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 16 hours ago

Calm down, he isn't the sole regent of the kernel, you know.