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Comment by tcmart14 | Hacker News Reader

The amount of shit takes on that thread are astonishing from people wanting to paint Hector's comments in a bad light. Trying to twist his words to extrapolate a meaning that isn't there. Of course, there are tons of people who also have no clue how hardware support comes into being. Some hardware is buggy on linux, has been and may always will be. A lot of the reason is, either the drivers had to be reverse engineer, which takes a lot of time and effort. Or, something that happens a lot, vendors throw together shitty drivers and call it a day. No hate for the SEs at these companies though. Some of these companies invest all their money in the development of hardware and clench up the purse strings once it comes time to write the actual drivers. Then from here, either the driver is open source and no one gives a damn to go fix the driver, or your back at needing to do some reverse engineering.

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>The amount of shit takes on that thread are astonishing from people wanting to paint Hector's comments in a bad light. Trying to twist his words to extrapolate a meaning that isn't there. [...]

um isn't there only one comment that matches what you're describing? i actually thought it was pretty neat how that discussion started out in the vein of a twitter thread, with one person misinterpreting another person's tweet and moralizing about it, but then you have that super long comment from alyssa 6 hours later that says "i think you're both right" and goes way into depth about how things are the way they are

on twitter there wouldn't have been the space for that comment and it would've been overrun by a bunch of people making quick moral judgements about a tweet they deliberately misinterpreted

This is actually my first time reading a mastodon thread, and I must say that the extra long comments allow for thoughtfulness, insightfulness and pleasant reading. At first I didn't read any of the replies because I was expecting the standard Twitter experience.

Definitely about Mastodon. I've been wanting to try out Mastodon and I finally took the plunge. So far, it seems a lot better because it allows for thoughtfulness. Will have to see how it goes!

I'm not surprised. Any time you talk about how terrible the Linux desktop experience is, you'll get people saying shit like "Why do you need that feature? Linux works just fine on my machine". Marcan really pissed off that crowd when he acknowledged the feature disparity between Linux and the preinstalled OS on prebuilts:

"I just realized that one of the things that bugs me is people equating stereotypical Linux problems on Asahi with other platforms, because it's not the same, because we actually care.

Suspend not working, audio not working, display tearing issues, power management being bad... all those things are Linux on $random_platform support memes. And they're memes because they never get fixed, because nobody cares."

It's a simple logical fallacy. Yes, the memes are true, but the explanation is false. Many many many people care.

It's evident if one looks at endless bug reports, mailing list discussions. Many users and maintainers care. But even though they do, the bugs are not trivial.

Many strange bugs are a consequence of subpar software architecture. One example that comes in mind is a bug about the xfce(?) lockscreen and laptop lid closing, that only activates when the lid opens. So for a time the desktop is visible. (There's also one bug where the password input field is invisible in some cases, etc.)

It seems security and UX critical functionality is broken.

But the truth of the matter is that it's also broken on many Windows setups too, just in other ways. Eg. complete freeze on restore.

Or look at the GitHub issues for WSL, there are a lot of strange bugs, like DNS stops working and only reboot solves it. And those Microsoft engineers care even less than some open source maintainers. (For example the TypeScript maintainers are very responsive, even though that repo also has a lot of bug reports.)

It isn't always even bugs. There are features I'd GNU+Linux to get rid of most notably the two clipboards. Screw that noise. We only need one clipboard. However, what we get is more code to keep the clipboards in sync.

https://codeyarns.com/tech/2017-01-18-the-two-clipboards-in-...

Oh gawd is THAT what that is??

I spend my days in aix and my evenings in windows. Every time I use Linux though, I get frustrated at seemingly completely unpredictable behaviour of clipboard! Now I at least have a basic understanding of the model - thx!

Don't touch my two clipboards. I use them both often and love it.

(There is actually more than two)

> Many users and maintainers care. But even though they do, the bugs are not trivial.

Hector's point is also that the ability to fix the bugs is diffuse: to fix a problem with the SSD you ultimately need to get the SSD maker to care. To fix a bug with the sound, you need to get the sound chipset maker to care. And actually to get a broadly good user-experience such that it works good not just on your system but every possible system, you need to get an awful lot of people to care.

As ever, one of the plusses of the Apple platform is the absolutely fixed set of hardware it needs to target. There is only one wireless chipset that Asahi needs to get working, for example. There is only one sound chipset they need to get working. When it's working, it's working for everyone, and if there's bugs they're bugs that affect everyone and aren't a result of some obscure combination of drivers interacting in unexpected ways.

Also, Apple actually internalized a lot of control in ways that really piss people off when they want to upgrade hardware, but it also means the SOC has a lot of power to just do things right in the first place since it's all software-driven anyway. You don't have to worry about the NVMe controller doing something weird because... the NVMe controller lives on the SOC (might even be fully software-defined?) and just talks to some flash chips sitting on a card. It's completely different from how the rest of the market does it, and it's undoubtedly more work to get it going, but it also (paradoxically) means they don't have to worry as much about hardware quirks, because there's less hardware in the middle to begin with.

It's undoubtedly a reason they've been able to make such great progress - not that the dev team isn't extremely extremely talented anyway. But they don't have to solve the general Linux problem of getting 10 billion possible permutations of hardware to behave together. They just have to solve one platform with one set of peripherals.

It's the Asahi team using Apple's own cultural proclivities for their benefit. All the single chipsets, and merged functionnality into the SOC are things Apple wants for themselves. I can't begin to imagine how cost-effective it must be to skip the NVMe controller chips in all their hardware.

Yea, Apple's vertical integration and absolute homogeneity are definitely big factors here. Also size of userbase, and the expectations of said users. (As someone already mentioned folks buy Pine64 SBCs for 20-50 bucks for fun, to tinker, to run their hobby projects, but almost nobody buys an M1/M2 chipped device for thousands of dollars "for this funny little project".)

But what I find very frustrating is that many software projects - especially open source ones - don't really think about the end-to-end user experience and don't have "interfaces" to help manage the UX, as in signal that the device is not respecting some standard/protocol/API/whatever. At best there's some obscure error message. Assertion failed. Blahblah.

I mean ... I know there were latops with Ubuntu stickers, but it's just not a big thing - as far as I know. Sometimes niche manufacturers with some newsworthy feature (FOSS firmware, drivers, etc) get into the news, but that's why it's news, because there's just no run-of-the-mill boring supplier...

A Mac mini is $600, which is pricier than $50, but that's not thousands, plural.

Oh come on, Hector constantly comes off as condescending and insulting to people that don't immediately bow down to his opinion and his immediate viewpoint. It's not like he's a saint, his Mastodon (and previously Twitter) feed is full of drama where he belittles other people and also takes things out of context. He's like that guy in the team you have that's very smart but also thinks everyone else is an incompetent monkey and constantly puts them down over it.

This linked post is pretty clear example of that - after decades of hundreds of people making sure that hundreds of configurations worked very well on Linux, he's now all smug because they're working on a single Apple configuration.

The social interactions he ends up having are of his own making as well.

I agree Marcan instigates a lot of twitter drama, but "hundreds of configurations worked very well on Linux" is kind of a stretch unless you're counting headless servers and really low end machines. There's a reason why Linux desktop has 1% market share (mostly chromebooks) and it's not because of Microsoft. I appreciate the work those devs did, but they really didn't move the needle. Neither has Marcan, but hey at least he is acting like a product guy and prioritizing features that are deal breakers on pretty much every other Linux system.

He's building out same features that already work on many other devices. Yes, there are hundreds of laptop models with fully working hardware (including sleep, bluetooth, speakers, power saving and whatnot), so there have already been plenty of developers that were "product" guys.

And that's all even if we ignore Android and ChromeOS devices exist.

It doesn't make Hectors contribution any less important for all of the Apple fans, but putting down other Linux developers like this is disgusting.

Exactly. These days there are several vendors preinstalling GNU/Linux on their machines where everything works, and it's really not hard to find machines where it's not preinstalled but where everything works anyway. These memes are memes because it's also not hard to stumble upon a machine where it doesn't if you just take a random one, but that's hardly surprising - just take a look at how much effort it takes to run Windows on Steam Deck and have everything work well there. Someone needs to put that effort first when the vendor does not.

I love those "I had issues so everyone else must have had them too" takes. I can give some anecdata too: the last integration issue I had on machines I've been running GNU/Linux on was a non-working SoundBlaster Audigy card somewhere around 2006 - and I've been mostly using laptops afterwards, some of them being from vendors that didn't provide any GNU/Linux support at all.

(that sound card eventually gained support in ALSA, by the way)

He does make a point of wanting things to work well. I have been using Linux on a 2013 laptop for five years now and I can't say I have ever run into a problem. I do remember having to install some obscure wifi driver (that was in the repo!) for some other older machine but that is all.

But I am not sure it works well. Hibernation never worked. Was performance, sound optimal ? Battery life ? I love that they are working on thing like that.

Hardware support is not the reason why Linux has 1% market share. Most users get a fully licensed copy of Windows bundled with their laptop, and it works, and it does everything they want, so why change it? I would argue that the software side is more important, with Linux still sucking at HiDPI setups (as seen in ~every non-ultra-cheap laptop) and with GNOME being GNOME.

For non-OEM desktop PCs, I completely agree that it's all about userspace. Last time I tried daily driving Linux, the terrible HiDPI support (after 4K panels have been widely available for a decade) was one of my biggest issues along with the weird frame pacing that made some apps feel as smooth as sandpaper even on relatively fast 120Hz VRR hardware.

For laptops however, hardware support is still terrible or nonexistent. If you have a modern wifi 6/6E chipset, a fingerprint sensor, or a webcam that uses the chipset ISP, there's a very good chance it's unusable. Battery life is still a decade behind state of the art.

My Dell laptop’s got a WiFi 6 card and a fingerprint sensor. The WiFi card works (although I don’t have a WiFi 6 network). The fingerprint lets me register fingerprints, but I can’t log in with it, which is probably another case of crappy software.

> after decades of hundreds of people making sure that hundreds of configurations worked very well on Linux, he's now all smug because they're working on a single Apple configuration.

Nowhere in the linked post does he talk negatively about those efforts, more about hardware manufacturers not doing their job. But he's objectively right about the average Linux experience on a random laptop. I have never owned a hardware configuration where everything worked with Linux except for the Steam Deck. My best experience was on a Thinkpad from 2016 and on that one I still had to adapt and compile my own wifi driver.

The opening post concludes with "nobody cares", which is obviously false, and it was a nice gigantic straw man dunked in jet fuel and then set on fire to attract all the flame war moths.

> Oh come on, Hector constantly comes off as condescending and insulting to people that don't immediately bow down to his opinion and his immediate viewpoint

Don't know the guy, but from my experience people who "vehemently contest" the opinions and viewpoints of project leaders can come off arrogant and know-it-all from the POV of the people who are actively working on the project and bootstrapped it from zero to success.

It's one of those "clash of the titans" scenario.

I mean it's to be expected: a popular project gets a lot of praise but also a minority of vocal critiques.

How single project leaders react, unless they are obviously abusive and/or violent on average/randomly, it's not really that important IMO.

> The social interactions he ends up having are of his own making as well.

That doesn't make him wrong, this topic in particular is a real pain point: manufacturers don't care about Linux users at all, it's their fault if Linux is mostly a less smooth than it could and should be experience.

No twisting required.

> we actually care … they never get fixed, because nobody cares

He's pretty explicit. He thinks he and his care more than other distributions.

I'm sure his observations have nothing to do with only supporting two related SoCs vs thousands of disparate chipsets, and the ability to repro from there.

It's a terrible comment.

No. Nobody cares if my cheap white label Walmart laptop crashes on standby. I can open an issue on every distro on existence, nothing will happen, no kernel dev will suddenly go out, buy that same laptop, and fix standby.

You've mudged care and ability to action.

Plenty of hardware gets attention for exactly the same reason M1/M2 do. It's nothing to do with care, everything to do with access.

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