I feel like I'm coming in to the middle of an emotional conversation about a topic which has a lot of backstory I don't know about. Someone here care to bring me up to speed?
Drew didn't like Rust very much, and criticized it a lot for it's complexity. He is also a very vocal supporter of open-source, going so far as to disable NVIDIA's non-free driver support in his wayland window manager/compositor Sway.
On top of that, he made SourceHut, an alternative to GitHub/Gitlab and some other innovative projects, like Gemini.
EDIT: Drew did not make Gemini, but he is still one of it's most vocal promoters. /EDIT
Recently, he even disclosed a new systems language, much simpler than Rust and more flexible than Golang.
Suffice to say, he's made some enemies that don't want him and his team to succeed.
Drew didn't make Gemini, at least not if "make" means started the project or came up with the idea. See also, the Gemini FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
I think he has been involved in the Gemini community at some level(?); I expect he's made a server and/or client, but lots of people have done that. Indeed, making the protocol simple enough for ~anyone to implement it is one of the goals of Gemini as far as I understand it.
Drew has built some great gemini software, but he didn't make Gemini, it is a community project led by Solderpunk.
AFAIK this is backwards. It was NVIDIA developers that decided to invent their own thing (EGL Streams) instead of supporting Mesa GBM. This meant open source projects had to support a special backend for wayland specifically for NVIDIA harware. KDE also refused to support it until an NVIDIA dev stepped up to do the work for them.
Sway works on Nouveau (the severely limited open source NVIDIA driver) with the wonderfully named flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia".
Also, that legendary flag was removed in a recent commit:
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/commit/b48cb6b0ec1320ad25fd2c...
This is the "Donald Trump is an American politician..." take.
Drew is most well-known as a high-profile FOSS troll. You should view some other entries in his blog.
My first experience with Drew was "Developers shouldn't distribute their own software." That post goes directly to the heart of the question, "Why would you call him a troll?" Because he has glib and self-serving answers for every seemingly hard question in software.
The guy has his opinions. It's his blog. You are free to express your opinions on your blog.
Why? Because I've yet to experience an instance where his views were at all illuminating or helpful. For each and every issue I've seen him confront, he seems to choose the most shallow, uncritical, provocative path. It's Fox News-style opinion journalism for FOSS.
This is kind of the problem with his writing in general; it has a Rashomon quality. In this particular post, he expresses an admirable sentiment (devs shouldn't be responsible for packaging, users need to take more responsibility for their distro) and then fails to consider any of the practical problems with his approach (What if devs want users to use their software? Users and maintainers generally don't give a shit about your software). Yet with his usual DeVault-ian flourish, he concludes that he's solved all the intractable problems of software distribution.
Spoiler alert: He hasn't.
> A user compiling from source or using a distribution's package manager is unambiguously less harmful than having them rely on opaque binaries.
The question I have is: Is that really his argument? Because I guess I missed it. Please read it again, and then again. Because I think you may be seeing what you want to see. See my discussion re: the Rashomon quality of his writing.
The blog entry that really hit home for me re: what Drew is really about was "A megacorp is not your dream job". Drew, as far as I know, isn't speaking from some deep well of experience or knowledge ("I worked for Google and let me tell you..."). He also never makes an argument. After awhile you realize he's not really saying anything at all. It's fundamentally contentless (like this entry "bleh"). It's all just vibes, like Fox News's opinion journalism or Trump is just vibes.
Yes, that is his argument. I reread the post when you contested the first time, and I reread it again now, and it is unambiguously his argument.
> Drew, as far as I know, isn't speaking from some deep well of experience or knowledge
He worked for SpaceX, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
Oh yeah? Guess I'm too thick to get it then. FWIW, I don't see him ever mention reproducible binaries, and I don't see that post as being especially in favor of users compiling from source.
> He worked for SpaceX, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? And I'm afraid you may be missing mine. He doesn't talk about his SpaceX experience in the post, and that fact only goes to underline my point. What he's talking about is not his experience, at least as far as we can discern, rather it's about the vibey-ness of the thing (Drew: "We all know Megacorps are evil...").
(And, wow, the fact he worked for SpaceX is hilarious given his views on FOSS. Tesla/SpaceX are terrible re: FOSS. Much, much worse than any FAANG.)