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Is Asahi Linux developer momentum slowing down?
7 points by aliqot on Nov 20, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
Before the pitchforks and accusations of me being a critic come out, let me say I'm interested in seeing Linux on Apple Silicon, and I am grateful for the effort put forth so far. I've been following the project aside from what's just posted here on HN.

Standard disclaimer: nobody is being paid to work for my interests, yada yada, be that as it may, from the outside looking in, I have concerns and am noticing a pattern that to me indicate that tangible dev interest is waning.

Looking at git commits, progress-reports, blog/social posts, HN posts, Asahi Linux's momentum and dev-interest it had a few months ago is slowing down when judged by those points.

- Are there other initiatives out there addressing linux on the m1/m2 aside from Asahi?

- Asahi was very productive independently over the past year, but not many others are contributing at that level or frequency it once had. Are any larger distros considering officially targeting Apple Silicon?

- Are there plans for Asahi as a project to accrue more formalized funding or structure to generate more interest in the development duties toward achieving feature completion?

I like the hardware, I like linux, and I like where Asahi is going. After seeing many passionate projects driven by only a few developers flame out or slowly miss their mark after the fanfare died down, I wanted to get the discussion going with regards to surfacing any alternatives or other movers that are addressing this, or highlighting any possible needs that Asahi may have that would enhance its longevity and trajectory.

I hope this post is interpreted not as criticism but as care and concern and a first effort toward getting help for the project if this is indeed the case. Rather than debate over the facts, and whether or not this is just the clearing of low hanging fruit revealing longer and more difficult goals for the project, perhaps we could use this thread to address alternatives and possibilities with regard to helping Asahi move toward completion.

Thanks



I cannot speak for the project; that said, concern trolling over the status of a project with a limited amount of developers that has accomplished very specific gains in a short amount of time seems a bit much.

Are you feeling a bit entitled with regard to timelines? Do you feel compelled to wrest control of the project to suit your own aims? Or, are you simply bored with the notion that a given developer (or team) might need a breather?


I’ve seen the progress they’ve made, but I don’t watch closely.

Could this just a “the other 90%” thing?

They made a ton of progress in a very short period of time. But as time goes on the wins are smaller and may be harder and harder to figure out. So even putting in the same (or more) time, progress towards completion will naturally slow down over time. Right?

From what I’ve read from some of the developers things function exceptionally well already. Seems like they’re doing a great job to me.


Asahi has been pretty much on-track with their own projected estimates. They had claimed that basic GPU accelerated desktop will happen by the end of the year, and that seems to be the case. If you want to fund them, they have listed their various sponsorship/patreon channels. The rest, as is often the case in open source projects, boils down to, "Don't ask for ETAs".


I would assume they started with low hanging fruits- so you’re simply seeing 80/20 rule [0] reflected on the progress / commits.

[0] Often 80% of the work might take 20% of the time, whereas the remaining 20% might take 80% of the time.


They can entirely wrk to their own timeline as there are no deadlines. I know Alyssa is active on the Twitter replacement she uses.


It absolutely is not, just go to Lina's channel and you can see just how far she's come and that's just Lina; excluding all the other contributes.




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