Our new flagship distro: Fedora Asahi Remix | Hacker News Reader

Our new flagship distro: Fedora Asahi Remix

asahilinux.org

88 pointsdev_tty01105 comments

talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater; i'm not interested in inter-domain squabbles, I just wanted to read about your distro.. now, less so.

separate the drama and direct it to those that can enact change. manipulating the commons with emotional pleas to put pressure on operators is the same reason I can't stand twitter.

it's trivial to get around, but i'm not going to.

whynot?

because i'm being stereotyped as a 'HN user', and generalizations (as mentioned in the plea) are harmful and unfriendly.

So, much like they did , i'm opting out; but I only lose a single experience, they lose an audience.

Linux open source world has always been full of drama and unusual personalities. Just look at Richard "interject for a moment" Stallman and Linus "no YOU are full of bullshit" Torvalds. It's pretty fun ngl.

Idk much about Asahi but seems like some guy is releasing incredibly impressive work while also trolling a bunch of grouchy people with the vtuber and anime stuff.

"I'm being stereotyped as a 'HN user'" no you're not, they're just blocking HN. Stop being so fragile. "I'm not reading their tech blog because they blocked traffic from a website I sometimes read", come on.

The text is critical of HN, not of you. Unless you think you're one of the people who leaves "comments containing blatant harassment, abuse, and bigotry directed at multiple Asahi Linux developers".

This text is critical of him not in the content, but in the form it is presented.

The author admits they were not able to persuade admins of HN to do as the author pleased, and then decided to kick the users.

Are you saying the text is critical of /u/serf? How so? Is /u/serf a moderator's alt? You're gonna have to explain.

It is not the text itself that is critical, it is the form of the presentation in conjunction with text contents.

You're gonna have to explain that more thoroughly, I'm not seeing it. I don't understand how it's possible to click a link on HN, see that message about "we have blocked HN because of a large amount of harassment in HN comment sections", and think the message is critical of me. I know I'm not writing comments which harass them, so I know it's not targeted at me.

They're not blocking hn, they're blocking users who have visited hn. I had been following their project and I had not seen any disparaging comments on hn, nor had I joined any discussion. After finding the comments in question, at least the ones that hadn't been moderated away, they seemed pretty tame... unless there were worse that I couldn't find?

In any case, consider that they've now turned a lot of conversation from being about their project to being about their blocking and they've directed a whole bunch of eyes away from their work to the comments they didn't like. Of course they're free to do so but it seems fairly counterproductive.

They do get moderated eventually most of the time. But not always, and not fast.

The "blocking people who visited HN" part is accurate, but that's only after HN decided to noreferrer Asahi links (unlike all others).

> They're not blocking hn, they're blocking users who have visited hn.

IIRC, they used to block only on the referrer, until HN removed the referrer only for their domain (and I believe after that was pointed out from all outbound links).

> separate the drama and direct it to those that can enact change

I don't think it's just drama. You're saying that the way that they're handling this is immature and confrontational. It's hard to respond to something with perfect poise when it causes an inordinate amount of pain

I think it's slightly better than the hairy egg one.

Congratulations to Asahi for finding a good upstream partner. Red Hat drama aside, Fedora seems like a good place to land for fast moving but mainstream and with resources.

Meta: What a close-minded and sweeping statement to make with that pop-up. It's just a really bad, wrong opinion. It is so wrong, it makes me wonder if the author has "flagged" enabled or if they have some kind of accessibility mode which doesn't fade downvoted comments.

HN can get pendantic, and any non-private forum has bad takes on it. But this is the equivalent of a comedian getting heckled by one person and telling the audience to go fuck themselves.

But then again, if one thinks HN only has 1% interesting commentary, we're already too far apart to reconcile.

Good luck with the actual computer stuff. Running fedora natively on a MacBook with good trackpad performance would be amazing.

> But then again, if one thinks HN only has 1% interesting commentary, we're already too far apart to reconcile.

That ... is not what the text says.

Yeah, it pretty much is.

I'd copy and paste it, but I can't because of the hacky implementation. Suffice it to say it shits on HN for reasons I disagree with. I still root for them to do well on the core project.

You should've copy/pasted it, maybe you would've found out what it actually says:

> we find that only a tiny fraction of HN ... actually engage with the substance of our articles

Emphasis mine.

"Most comments on HN have interesting commentary" is 100% compatible with "only a small fraction of HM comments on articles from Asahi engage with the substance of those articles".

In fact, you may even find discussions which have nothing to do with "the substance of [their] articles" to have interesting commentary!

Well, I stand corrected, which I will always acknowledge. (Thought I literally can't copy the text on desktop or mobile).

It does indeed say "our articles", when I thought it was speaking more broadly.

So, whatever. Still seems like a counterproductive way to communicate their issues. It is still telling me, someone who was interested in their blog post, not to participate in their discussion or learn about their project, because I came from HN. And I guess that chaps me because I don't see the problem they see.

But I've already moved on (aside from checking comment replies every few hours like a normal work day).

I’ve been running Asahi on my secondary machine (M2 Air) and it’s been quite good. I’m happy with Arch though, so unlikely to switch to the Fedora remix, but it is tempting - I haven’t distro hopped in almost a decade now.

If you don’t like Arch or Fedora, note that there’s unofficial installers for a few other distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, and Rocky. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW%3AAlternative-Dis...

Well that's a hell of a specific block message.

Always interested in checking out new Linux distros but not interested in drama.

Most of what I've seen on HN about Asahi has been enthusiasm and admiration of their rapid progress. Curious what they're seeing.

Yes, others have similarly observed that HN absolutely fawns over Asahi but the Asahi crew have somehow got it into their heads that HN readers are bigots that have it in for them. In that sense, the referrer block seems to at least make sense if you look at it the other way around, HN readers can instead spend their time supporting an effort that doesn’t paint them all with the same brush.

How does saying that they have been consistently harassed from this platform paint everyone here with the same brush?

By blocking everyone coming from HN, they paint everyone here with the same brush, don't they?

Let's say I block all Tor users for my website, because the level of abuse that Tor enables means an overwhelming amount of the malicious traffic I encounter comes from Tor. Am I painting all Tor users with the same brush here, or am I just min-maxing my time and energy trying to wrangle all the crap?

Er, yes; if you block every TOR user then obviously you're painting them all with the same brush.

That phrase is usually referring to some sort of judgement or characterization, not a particular action. If a teacher makes the whole class stay late because a few were acting up, that's not painting with the same brush. If you think that all children are disruptive because a few acted up, that is.

Hm, I suppose that's a distinction that can be made. OTOH, I think someone posting

> In addition, we find that only a tiny fraction of HN comments (often less than 1%) actually engage with the substance of our articles, with the majority being off-topic, misinformative, repetitive, or otherwise of low quality, making the overall value of HN exposure overwhelmingly negative for our project.

very much is judging the actual people.

Ok but in both the case of HN and TOR, you're making a judgement about the kind of people on there. There's nothing inherently wrong with traffic from a TOR router, it's the users on there. HN referrals are similarly not a problem per se.

> If a teacher makes the whole class stay late because a few were acting up, that's not painting with the same brush

Huh, I'd think it is. Class goes home, and the acting up go to the principal is the regular non-sweeping treatment.

You're doing both. The TOR users would probably not be happy, but if you don't want them you don't want them. Now do you want to ban TOR users (probably doing illegal stuff) or HN users (mostly just normie SWEs)?

I've been following Asahi closely because I think the new apple silicon is pretty neat, offering 2x, 4x, and even 8x the memory bandwidth of most x86-64 hardware. In particular the Mac Studio M2 max. I've been quite impressed that Asahi have moved so quickly, in particular the 3d support for OpenGL and progress on Vulkan. Doesn't hurt that apple does pretty good on inference, managing 5 tok/sec on even large 65B models that wouldn't fit on any normal video card.

I'm a long time HN reader and was quite disappointed in HN that an Asahi post had like 90% of the posts that were pretty bigoted, harmful, and targeted more than one of the Asahi team. I watched as this happened. Who cares if someone is gay, straight, bi, or trans? Who cares if a psuedo identify is young, old, male, female, feline, rabbit, or whale?

Weirdly I've not seen that tendency anywhere else on HN, can't recall any similar discussions about any other members of the tech community. Sadly I can see that to Asahi, HN looks like a bunch of bigoted intolerant folks, which hasn't been my experience.

It's the contributions that matter, sad that the discussion didn't reflect that.

Maybe OP felt addressed xD

people can go to github to see the blog post without the block:

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/blob/main...

Disabling JavaScript also works. I have it disabled by default through uBlock Origin so I didn't come across the block message until I enabled it.

Seems to be hinting at the comments from this HN story [0]. Don't fuel the flame, but make your own conclusions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33789940

All of the top-level comments seem ... fine? Even the gray ones are just gray for being dumb or irrelevant. Not hate-y. I have showdead off, though, and didn't exhaustively scan the lower-level comments.

I get the impression they're hyper sensitive about the v-tuber persona, which is odd, because nothing seems to scream "look at me" more than adopting some very unusual virtual persona to publicly stream development for an open source project that a large number of people are interested in... So, they want attention, but don't want attention. They also seem to be engaging in the increasingly unproductive habit of putting "that made me sad" into the "that's [insert-favorite-prefix]-phobia!" bin.

To any HN reader who wants to read it - because it relies on the :visited CSS property, just open it in a private window in your browser.

Or delete the "hnsucks" <a> tags in developer tools.

Doesn't even work for me in a private window

I just had JS disabled by default.

Had to enable to see what the squabble was all about.

Alt link: https://archive.ph/zWlTu

I wonder how they're throwing up that banner. I'm unable to access the blog post even when I navigate to it from their main page now. At least Firefox's Reader Mode seems to do the trick! That, and archived links.

Here's the element:

  <a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" class="hnsucks hnsucks2" rel="nofollow" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971867">Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News. We've consistently found large numbers of comments containing blatant harassment, abuse, and bigotry directed at multiple Asahi Linux developers in HN comment sections, which go unmoderated for long periods of time or indefinitely. These abusive comments rank highly in search results for our project and the names of our developers, and continue to do so to this day.<br><br>In addition, we find that only a tiny fraction of HN comments (often less than 1%) actually engage with the substance of our articles, with the majority being off-topic, misinformative, repetitive, or otherwise of low quality, making the overall value of HN exposure overwhelmingly negative for our project.<br><br>We have tried to raise the issue of rampant abuse and low-quality discussion with HN mods, but instead of replying they added <code>rel="noreferrer"</code> to links to our site (specifically), to make it harder for us to block HN traffic. We sent a further email and explicitly pointed out a thread with multiple severe instances of directed, explicit harassment at one of our developers (including multiple allegations of mental illness, direct insults, misgendering, and transphobic dog whistles, all unmoderated and publicly visible and indexed). Some of these were removed weeks later (after being up for months), but they stopped responding after we pointed out even more instances of abuse.<br><br>At this point, we are forced to conclude that Y Combinator and Daniel Gackle are actively choosing to platform hate and harassment against open source developers, and further are actively working to evade blocking of this harassment by those targeted. For this reason, we are not interested in traffic or commentary from HN. Please move on to the next story.<br><br>To Dang: Do better.</a>

Ha! Love the class name. As others have pointed out, it seems to be a CSS trick.

I've never seen any criticism of Asahi on HN, but I'm not that deep into the topic.

While I applaud them for explaining their position clearly, it comes off as small, childish, and unprofessional. They're only drawing attention to the issue and making it worse.

Get over it. People posting comments on HN are not the real world. People write ugly things about CloudFlare, Adobe, and a hundred other companies and projects on HN all the time. You're not special. You ignore it and move on. It's called being an adult.

To Asahi: Do better.

There was nothing ever so professional about Asahi, but I don't care because nobody else has made Linux work so well on AS Macs.

In addition to your sibling comments, here's how they're achieving the effect:

1. JS loads from https://cdn.asahilinux.org/.h which contains a list of "blocked browser history entries". It's likely that this code will be used again for future HN posts. Interestingly, this is very generic and this code can be used by anyone to put up customised block lists based on browser history. This can be circumvented by using private browsing, disabling `mix-blend-mode` on `:visited` links, or `:visited` partitioning.

This JS code is used to automatically generate the main anchor element seen in the sibling comment.

2. According to MDN [1]:

> In addition, even for the above styles, you won't be able to change the transparency between unvisited and visited links, as you otherwise would be able to using the alpha parameter to rgb() or hsl(), or the transparent keyword.

So :visited links are not supposed to affect transparency. How did they do it, then? Using `mix-blend-mode`. The background uses `multiply` (also an anchor) is #FFF for normal visitors (transparent) while #000 for blocked visitors (opaque black). The text uses `lighten`, #000 (thus transparent) for normal visitors, while #fff (thus white text) for blocked visitors.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...

Is anyone able to find these specific instances? I did a search of Asahi on HN search, and all the comments on the top posts are positive, and none are attacks on the creators. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I would really like to know where this happened so I can see for myself.

If you want to find those, probably enable deadcomments on HN, go to the links, and scroll to the bottom where the flagged stuff is.

HN is disproportionately bigoted. I'm a trans person and using this site can be really fraught at times. They aren't painting all of HN with a brush; but it's fair to say that I wouldn't want HN discussing my projects either, because it'll tend towards right-wing hatred more often than not. That's just a large portion of the demographic of this website. I'm glad the Asahi team is taking a stance against bigotry instead of brushing it under the rug like so many "allies" do.

You can get butt hurt when someone says a group you're a part of has issues; or you can self-reflect and understand where the criticism is coming from. That's up to you.

I've seen some pretty bad sexism on articles about women in tech, but I don't recall that on any posts about Asahi. Transphobic commenters also (subjectively) seem like a small minority.

It doesn't matter if they're a minority if moderation just lets them use HN as a megaphone and post hundreds of comments before any sort of reaction.

Or in terms of a tired metaphor: If you refuse to weed out your bad apples, you can't really complain when people stop taking your fruit shipments because they keep spoiling their bunches :)

When you say disproportionate, what are you comparing against?

I am sorry you have had this experience. How can HN be better?

Better moderation/moderators who actually take transphobia seriously

I would love for you to point out comments that that are bigoted against trans people. HN has always been a trans-friendly website and major members of HN over the years have been either trans or openly pro-trans.

I've never seen it, which implies dang actually does his job.

I've seen it a number of times and tried to argue against it when possible. Many comment chains and posts about trans people have a couple of comments deriding them as mentally ill or denying their identity. They do go dead often, but that also doesn't happen immediately.

It's never going to happen immediately... comments are hidden after x amount of flags, and only made actually dead after human review (ie, dang looks at the mod queue). Anything else would be a fast path to (ab)using flagging to silence individuals.

I have showdead on, so I do see dead comments saying absolutely dumb shit from time to time. What I was asking for above was proof that, at this moment, there are comments that are as described and are not either dead or downvoted into oblivion.

There will always be dumb people saying dumb shit, no website on earth that has user created content will ever be free of that. As long as dumb people exist on the Internet, dumb things that were uttered by dumb people will continue be handled by mods.

It happens pretty consistently if you mention you're trans for any reason (even if it is fully on-topic) or you are visibly trans as the writer of the post itself, you will either get voted down or an entire tangent on how trans people are mentally ill, unreliable, how you shouldn't use any projects with trans people in leadership roles will form as as a subthread... Any number of unprompted off-topic discussion involving your mental state or how trans people in general are all delusional or going into transphobic talking points (which, if you push back on them, you'll be accused of being intellectually bankrupt or something - in a thread not even about trans people).

It's not "most of HN" in my experience, but more people could be calling these subthreads out, getting posts out of downvote hell and of course dang and friends could just cut that shit out, period.

Except... I've never seen that happen. There is no downvote brigade on HN that targets trans people. Being part of a downvote brigade is against the rules, and dang will ban you for doing it.

You are asking dang to do something that is already occurring. I have never seen any thread in showdead or not that specifically targets people for being trans.

I am going to re-iterate my request: show me the evidence.

I'm not going to argue with someone who has been on HN for so long "but never seen it", because that likely means you're one of those people who will argue indefinitely that "questioning biological gender" isn't transphobia, and that transphobic discussions just... aren't!

it's there, I urge you to be aware of it in the future and not harass people who are making others aware of it. and absolutely don't tell people that they're wrong for the transphobia they have often EXPERIENCED. (And no, you don't get to ask trans people to bring out the receipts of their trauma, wtf?)

Nobody is asking for trans people to "bring out receipts" of their trauma.

I'm asking for proof that dang has not done his job and that there are transphobic comment threads that have not been properly moderated out of existence.

Accusing people on HN of being transphobic for asking proof of transphobic behavior so that the moderators can moderate it is called "being a troll".

I'll reiterate my claim: It does mostly get moderated, but not entirely and often way too late when the post is falling off the front page anyway.

The comments do not happen on other platforms in the first place. HN just has a segment of people that will cause this. I don't want to explore if dang can personally change this or if this site needs a culture shift to address these (probably few) people, but they're there.

Here's a bunch of receipts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110507731403617388

Here's the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230649

And here's the other thread that marcan refers to that was [flagged][dead] for about the first 3 hours and only recovered because of attention elsewhere. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36030969

The last one also has some great comments (/s) ranging from grating to outright genocidal, especially if you switch on showdead.

It's not brushing it under the rug if I don't see it. As in, any time I have seen a bigoted comment it is downvoted or flagged.

The pushback is because what you're describing literally isn't observed, and no one is showing links or calling out accounts.

Maybe you're right, but it isn't my experience so nothing is "up to me" except continuing to flag or argue against biased comments.

Look through my comment history, there's literally extreme transphobia 5 comments back. Go through my comments, there's on average transphobia on every page that I try to address, because it's never addressed by dang, et al. It's been present ever since I started using this site. As compared to literally every other technical community I'm apart of, HN devolves into transphobia much more often. Just because you don't see something, doesn't mean it isn't there.

>Just because you don't see something, doesn't mean it isn't there.

I'm glad we agree.

As for extreme transphobia: the one thread most immediately does have an ignorant person making stupid claims about a boy liking dolls leading to transition. But is that extreme on the spectrum? And is it not downvoted, indicating that more people disagreeed than agreed with them?

It seems, at least, that said ignoramus actually believes what they are saying, rather than trolling. In which case I think it's good to leave their comment up to let people tear it down.

Removing non-troll comments solely because we dont like them will only drive the user further into bitterness and self assuredness by not being challenged, while onlookers like me are less likely to know they exist or how wrong they are.

FWIW, thanks for the explanation of related virtualization tooling.

This comment series (it's not just one comment, and your downplaying of it and not including eg that they called adults in trans children's lives "pedophiles" borders on the verge of dishonesty) is absolutely extreme on the spectrum of transphobia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36804092

The author should have been banned for this, not just downvoted.

I disagree, leaving up stuff like that just encourages more of it, and it shows how little HN cares about making a space that trans people can be comfortable contributing to. In fact, originally my comment was downvoted quite a bit too.

Starting about 3 pages in, there's on average some transphobia on every page of comments (find for 'trans', it turns out I've only ever said that on this site in response to transphobia hah). Not as extreme, but it becomes exhausting having to constantly defend my rights with very little help from the community at large, or dang. I've had to take a hiatus more than once because I realized I was getting bitter about the tech community, when it's really just HN.

I really do want to provide helpful and interesting comments where I can, and be apart of this community. I love parts of it so much. But as it is today, I completely understand Asahi's opinion of HN. I have to constantly choose my words very carefully for fear of angering the right-wing contingent on this site, with often no support (the most recent comment is an outlier).

> They aren't painting all of HN with a brush

You sure? I feel like painting 99% of a group of people with a brush is equivalent to painting the group as a whole.

Also a trans person and I felt obligated to log in for the first time in over a year seeing your comment.

I've seen comments here that are a nicely packaged up version of 4chan (non lgbt boards), and I strongly suggest you leave here because I think the issue is inherently a lack of moderation and I don't anticipate that changing. I'll be banned for this comment most likely, probably because its "inflammatory" but blatant transphobia apparently isn't, but this is the first HN link I've seen since I quit this site a long time ago and I'm just perpetually disappointed by this website. Cutting out transphobic joints like this was one of the best things I've done for myself.

And @ anyone else who is reading this - there's nothing more injustice loves than inaction. Take it from a trans person who quit because of the bigotry they saw - please believe me, it's a lack of moderation. Speak up for what's right. If you think you have nothing to do with it - by continuing to let it happen, you are silently condoning its existence.

I completely agree. The transphobia on this site is plentiful and abhorrent. The moderators are less than worthless when it comes to it (heavily implying they are part of the issue) and the moderators HATE when you point out failures in their moderation.

It should be expected given the rest of HN, but I'm putting it plainly for others as well, the site has a massive bigotry problem with its users, and a moderation issue with its moderators

I'm sorry this has been your experience. Thank you for sharing it, and know that it has prompted self-reflection for me.

I hope future online encounters are positive, wherever you are. :)

I see posts can be flagged and removed (censored?) from the front page. Is there any way users can vote for things to be un-flagged?

It's interesting how this site gets around the ``rel="noreferrer"`` added to the link from HN. The banner uses a :visited CSS attribute to selectively show/hide the banner client side if your browser has been to the URL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971867. With how many other browser history privacy leaks have been released lately using :visited hacks, I wonder how long it will be until browser vendors disable :visited support across domains entirely.

I’m not seeing the banner when coming from the comments on iOS Safari. Maybe it just doesn’t show on mobile though.

Nah, I'm getting it on mobile via Firefox. Sounds like a Safari thing.

Can confirm - no banner on Safari. So petty and ineffective at the same time!

Also on Firefox on Android but not getting the banner.

edit: Enabling JavaScript makes it show up. What a fucking ridiculous banner that is too, thankfully I don't have a macbook so I don't need to use this.

I'm confused, does the banner block the page normally? Firefox on Mac here with default settings aside from uBO extension, opened in separate (non-private) tab with cmd-click. Banner was at the bottom and didn't block anything. I didn't even notice it until I read the comments here.

For me it did block the full screen.

There is indeed a proposal to partition :visited links: https://github.com/kyraseevers/Partitioning-visited-links-hi...

Interesting that it only checks for the comments page. If you (like me) read the article before coming to the comments, then you'll not see the banner.

That feels like a typical user flow, which should make the banner fairly ineffective.

I feel for the developer, even if I am annoyed by the banner. It sucks to know that folks on HN have been so mean, when on a technical level, Asahi is a great project.

I typically open both the article and comments in tabs, and then read the article first (promise! :)), but I did see the banner.

You can get around the banner with this uBlock custom rule:

    asahilinux.org##[aria-hidden="true"]

I find it creepy that websites have a way to access my browser history. Luckily it seems like iOS Safari isn’t vulnerable, as is Tor (which I guess solves it by being in permanent private browsing mode?)

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