- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Perhaps not relevant to the conversation, but if you use and enjoy any FOSS product, donate money to the maintainers when you can
I’d like it if Valve steps up to do the job. They’re making hardware that needs WiFi, might as well go all in.
Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell
The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon. 😕
Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
Steve burned out a long time ago after all the free work he did on top of his day job.
It’s better if the titular Steve isn’t from US. Right now at least.
Unfortunately, relying on individuals is what caused the problen in the first place.
Did you try asking Steve? He won’t return my calls
And Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD. Or probably several others as well.
I mean, probably someone at qualcomm will likely take his place? They need drivers for themselves anyway and will probably continue providing them. I have no idea who the contributors of similar drivers are but I’d imagine Intel makes drivers for their wifi chips themselves and contributes them to the kernel since they count as one of the biggest contributors.
What is up with all the maintainers stepping down lately?
A number of them have written about their reasons- I can’t speak for the maintainer this article is about but the general sentiment I’ve seen from the ones I’ve been hearing about is that the culture around kernel development is dogwater. Lots of it surrounding refusal to make any space for R4L and shitting on devs working on it, but then also spinning out of that are maintainers likening their quality control responsibilities to being “the thin blue line”.
Original creators and maintainers are hitting retirement age.
And not many good younger people are available to take the mantle.
This is the long-term cost of how persnickety FOSS maintainers are when it comes to accepting outside contributions to their work.
Note that this isn’t exclusive to FOSS, but it’s just more transparent.
Over the last decade I’ve seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.
But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn’t mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.
It’s gotta change to true community, where we lift each other up, looking to the future, readying others to take our mantle when we retire. That’s the only way FOSS will thrive and have a chance to compete with corpos.
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Exhibit A. I wonder why nobody wants to work with you…
if a maintainer doesn’t want your sticky grubby toddler hands fuckin in their cookie jar, it’s their fucking cookie jar and they can tell you to fuck off.
Yeah, that is exactly how it works. And doing that leads to your tool dying since you have no clue how to foster a community to take care of it.
It actually leads to a fantastic product and more free time because you’re not having to babysit kids who think the world owes them something because they can code ‘hello world’ in python.
Then the old maintainers retire and die, and so does their precious baby that was ‘open source’ but not really, stranding it all in an old distro. But hey, who cares how shitty the world is after you die amirite?
The code is open and there for you to read. What you’re actually saying is you’re too lazy to read and understand it because the world owes you something. amirite?
Lol you sound like a Russian bot. That take is wildly off-topic and in bad faith. Reread the thread and come back
It honestly (usually) does lead to a fantastic product! I maintain my own significantly used tools independently and completely agree. I also have seen locally (as a corporate pawn and life-long software engineer) what happens once somebody quits and no longer maintains their beautiful project(s).
You work so much FASTER alone than you do in a group. You also can NEVER get as far with your tool when you work alone. I think the best FOSS tools are born from independent savant developers, but for them to reliably be carried on, they have to be passed down to SOMEONE. It’s not your job to foster the entire next generation of tablet-children to be able to push golden commits to your curl 2.0 repo; it is pretty worthwhile to foster at least a handful of interested and headstrong people to understand your work in its entirety, and carry on its progress. And then they can do the same, and FOSS will live on forever (as it SHOULD be).
You probably spent an obscene amount of time developing an S+ tier piece of tooling, it would be pertinent to spend another marginal month or so to raise some lil star to be able to mimic your work once you tap out.
Having more free time is cool, but there’s more things in life. As MC Ride said: “LIKE GETTING YOUR DICK. RODE ALL FUCKING NIGHT.” Find some lil dick rider to carry on your shit.
Jfc your replies in this thread are so cringe. Gatekeeping boomer energy.
Oh the irony. What’s gatekeeping about not wanting rubbish code in your repository? Lack of knowledge is self-gatekeeping.
The ‘wah wah…boomer’ cries are…cringe. Either step up with the knowledge and action, or don’t bother and cry “gatekeeping”.
Found an obsolete greybeard
Yeah it’s really a mystery why no one wants to step up with well-regulated people like this one in the space.
Yeah, this is a terrifying response that chases away young talent. I saw a comment mentioning how the mature devs are cut out and don’t have the chance to help pull up the new dev/give them training and wisdom.
If the older maintainers don’t have time for new devs without all the experience they gained over a lifetime, then FOSS is in for a crash.
You are pretty much the case in point: Grossly stereotyping the alternative into a perspective only based on extreme prejudice with an ample amount of pet peeves projected from personal experience. Like, I was actually expecting to see at least one valid counterpoint, like how much corporate interests shit on and ransack OSS, or the inherent dichotomy between software maintained out of goodwill in an environment that’s increasingly defined by greed and intellectual property bullshit inside failing economies, but nope.
Woah I disagree so much with all that
Edit: Maybe not the sprint stuff
They’re waiting on ChatGPT15 and it’s ability to re-write the GNU/Linux kernel in Python3 and PHP5, commit to master branch, and finally rid the wider POSIX community of “Digitial Equipment Corp. refugees/VAX apologists who poison the minds of the youth by mentioning pointers, time sharing, endianess, word size, registers, and worst of all that while Multics may seem obtuse to the uninitiated, the way it handles memory is actually galaxybrain.”
TL;DR - Seymour Cray tried to do for super computing what Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad did for men who were honorable not only in front of the wife and family but ultimately GOD.
mentioning pointers, time sharing, endianess, word size, registers
You’re making me hard! Don’t stop!
The suggestion that you could go from little endian to big endian by reading about multics and shitposts about turbo assembler means you’re either some kind of degenerate libertine IRIX wizard who still uses bogimps to talk about speed in relation to MIPS or the human manifestation of exclusive XOR or as the Cartesians say “what would happen if I didn’t NOT ?!”
Why not port everything to JavaScript and electron. Haha
ability to re-write the GNU/Linux kernel in Python3
Alert(“Hi I’m a kernel panic crashing this party on behalf of the Self programming language by way of not having a type system, a String not really being a string, and was expecting a long long unsigned int instead of an Integer”);
Omg we could re-write it in dart-lang too in /usr/src/experimental/top-secret/.hide-this-from-the-ai/linux-kernel-dart-7.0.0-SNAPSHOT
They were doing this all by themselves?!
Well, “maintainer” is usually a single person job. They didn’t write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.
So I mean, it’s not great nobody is stepping up, but it’s also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux’s wifi support single handed, either.
Other people stepped up like within a day.
That’s great! Any idea who?
Where did you read that? I only saw Johannes Berg saying he couldn’t maintain that stack too, after three days.
Ah cool, the one time I read the article it’s wrong and saying that there hadn’t been someone who had stepped up yet.
Well, I’ll go back to making uninformed comments based solely on the headline, because clearly the articles are not adding any value. (/s, etc.)
There’s lots of developers contributing to the wifi drivers, there’s just no “lead maintainer” now
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Btw, you can embedd the image like that:
It will look like that:
Oddly xkcd’s image has no signature or other information identifying the creator.
Unless you get one of the day’s 10’000, it’ll be recognised by any tech people.
Post in addition to the link.
Just shut it all down, Nebraska guy. The world doesn’t appreciate you.
Seems like nowadays Nebraska guy is more likely to be a rabid Trump supporter who likes the way things have been so far in 2025. 🤮
The article isn’t entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I’d expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.
That explains many things
Ethernet cable intensifies
I hope they invent wireless ethernet
Maybe we can put it on the open 2.4GHz spectrum and encrypt it with RC4.
Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol. It can run on many different mediums and cable types.
But can it run over wet string, though?
I bet you can run 10base2 over it
WiFi is a fad anyways.
If you can’t bite it, it doesn’t exist.
Weird that’s what my girlfriend says.
WiMax gang rise up
I need to get some Meshtastic modules…
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/youngsters_in_foss/
Read this a few days ago and it feels pretty relevant here.
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The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.
For example, if AOL back in the day had made ‘campus edition’, then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the “modern” connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL’s strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.
Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren’t already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been “worth it”.
So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been “contained” to the places where it’s pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.
anyone working with FOSS should be celebrated much more. They are the people who make the world better for all of us while money grubbers are driving it to hell.
git gud.
And it’s not that hard. Here’s a primer:
- git clone - download a copy of a repo (do once)
- git checkout - change branches (-b to create a new branch); a branch is a set of changes (commits, state of the code) and you can easily jump between them
- git add - select files you want to commit (submit to the project)
- git commit - do the commit; etiquette for the message is one line brief summary of the change, then a blank line, then optional additional paragraphs with more explanation
- git push (
-u origin <branch name>the first time for a new branch) - send the changes to your online repo
When you run into problems, ask for help. Each team does things a little differently, so you’ll want to ask your lead before doing most other git operations.
I’m a lead and I’m happy to sit with new team members for a half hour and walk them through the basics and with their first few commits. Everyone seems to catch on pretty quickly.
being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science
Eh, let them try and fail at starting their own thing. It turns out, writing software is hard, and writing good software is even harder, especially when you need to build it from scratch. FOSS is a wealth of pretty good code that you can build off of to make cool stuff quickly.
But it doesn’t build itself, FOSS needs people to maintain it, and at some point you’ll need something nobody else wants to build. But maintaining that thing takes time, and people out there will help you with it once you build it. So build your thing in such a way that it can solve other use cases, and people will start using it, and some will contribute to it, solving their own use cases because it’s easier than making their own thing.
That’s what FOSS is, it’s a community effort to share solutions to problems so others help you make it better. You benefit from their work, and they benefit from yours, and everyone is better off. Businesses are easier to build on FOSS, as are hobby projects, so share as much as you can so you don’t have to maintain it yourself.
I honestly don’t see a business case for not using and contributing to FOSS extensively. It’s just too expensive to build or buy everything yourself.
You don’t need to gate keep to only those with a quest to solve problems, just appeal to human nature and demonstrate that FOSS is good for selfish pursuits as well. It turns out that a rising tide (FOSS) lifts all boats.
Should I be worried?
No.
Great! FreeBSD needs help with WiFi!
Is it the new cool thing for Linux maintainers to step down?
Third time I’ve seen it recently…
It’s demographics. Linux contributors & maintainers skew heavily to the older end of the spectrum (and, although not relevant to this point, also skew heavily male).
People who can contribute time to a project for free tend to be older because they are financially and career settled by the time they hit 50s. Raising a family tends not to leave a lot of spare time.
Bingo.
Contributing and/or maintaining a FOSS project < not getting murdered by my wife for “playing on my computer instead of spending time with my family.”
It could be some of the most mission-critical work imaginable, but she’d still see it as goofing around because I’m not getting paid, and she requires attention. And I love the hell out of my wife, so happy wife indeed equals happy life.
Make linux your wife and then everyone will be happy.
Except OP.
Yeah but the issue with the guy leading Asahi Linux, which is probably the other one mentioned, has nothing to do with him being old.
That also happens. I’m honestly surprised they lasted that long, doing any OS work on Apple hardware sucks. You have a small user base and an even smaller contributor base, poor documentation, and zero support from the manufacturer. It’s the perfect storm of headwinds.
And this is how I see Linux quickly unravelling and planned insecurities creeping in over the next decade or so.
Jeeze. Not everything is doom. Someone else will step up. In fact, they already have started adjusting.
These things happen periodically.
It turns out people switch jobs, retire, or just burn out. Other maintainers can cover while they select a new one.
You’re being dramatic, the world will collapse before this becomes a problem
I always say the doom of humanity won’t be wars or something sudden. It’ll be something that’s been silently happening: the extinction of species and ecosystems one by one that’s been accelerating in the last 50 years. And now with global warming, it’ll only get worse because environments are changing and forcing species out of their homes.
And this is something I don’t see getting better at all. Social media just seems to have made people even more egocentric and selfish and actionless too, because ranting about problems online makes people feel like they did their part.
We’ll just witness the world falling apart one disaster after another and watch it as “entertainment” on TikTok and Reels, until it’s our turn.
how so?
I would’ve figured there were multiple standards and such requiring multiple drivers and maintainers, nonetheless manufacturers doing it themselves.
You’re right that there are many drivers and people from manufacturers responsible for hardware families, but there still needs to be a maintainer for the subsystem as a whole.
That person reviews what the manufacturers and other contributors send in, to validate that things are still compatible where they touch in the kernel, and that the code is good enough. They then prep the commits of the subsystem for inclusion into the next kernel version and pass that to Linus, is my understanding.
One maintainer, multiple supported devices
So two thousands and ten eleven
twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twentyone twentytwo twentythree twentyfour twentyfivetwentynine is the year of Linux on desktop!I used to daily drive Ubuntu some years ago for work/personal use but have been back on Win 10 primarily for the last 4-5 years. I was considering trying to go back due to how much Windows sucks (despite some proprietary software only being available on it) but remembering the trouble I had with some networking/printer drivers and troubleshooting those issues and then seeing this article Is definitely making me reconsider…
I haven’t seen Wireless driver issues in years. Any non arcane devices have drivers and most distros enable most of them in their kernel.
Just built a brand new linux desktop, no wifi dongles work in it.
If I want wifi i need specifically order from this company.
I’m gonna be so sad if this doesn’t work
Debian? Ubuntu?
Because those use old kernels (okay, maybe ubuntu patches in newer versions of in kernel drivers) Recent kernel updates got many new supported wifi chipsets:
https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/USB_WiFi_Chipsets.md
I’m talking about the newest version of Mint I installed last month that is useless because it can’t use the drivers for the wifi dongles I own
I had to search that exact list last month and then wait a month for this specific wifi adapter to ship to me when I assumed I could use my brand new realtek usb wifi adapter
If you read through the list you will see the company in the article has the only wifi adapter that claims to actually have support
Imagine, if you had kernel 6.13 (instead of kernel 6.1) you could have just used that dongle…
Edit: 6.8, not 6.1
Mint is u ubuntu based is debian based that uses old kernels.
I think old kernel are fine in server and embedded devices, but not on user desktop.
So I don’t recommend debian based
This is the kind of stuff that makes it really hard to justify using linux.
I was told to use Mint because I was told it would work with modern hardware.
Can I just update the Kernal sonehow? or does that require a reinstall of Mint?
You could install an alternative kernel and install that, but this would most likely fuck your mint install since it is built for that specific major kernel version eg. You only get x.xx.->yy<- updates, rest needs major mint upgrade which they release “late” compared to rolling distros like openSuse Tumbleweed.
Maybe there is an up to date out of tree version of the kernel from lwfinger that you can install, which dongle did you get?
The problems you encounter exist, because of the popular chicken and egg problem, where chip designer ignore linux due to user base and user base is small because of not same chip support as proprietary OSs.
Linux Mint is currently on 6.8, so at least not 6.1, but it’s also not new enough to benefit from all the newly added drivers in 6.13.
Thank you for correction! ☺️
Wireless drivers are in a lot better state than they used to be, printer drivers are very dependent on the brand you have.
IME (YMMV) Brother printers seem to consistently work quite well and Epson printers seem to consistently be shit.
Literally have the opposite experience. Fought with my old Brother printer constantly. My Epson Ecotank is rock-solid.
I’ve used Epson and Brother printers without issue, though I suppose things could change on a per-model basis or over time.
They have already adjusted the team.
It astounds me that people who support linux get personally offended if you say you’re not sure linux is for you.
I watched a video where a guy installed linux, and then installed a new desktop environment that caters to touchscreen. He got a bunch of errors. So he said “Ah, that’s alright! I’ll just bring up terminal”
And then he types
sudo add do willywop bojanga -l -r ♧¿¤☆▪︎●
And I’m like “ok, hold on. How the fuck does he just KNOW that exact string is what will fix it???”
If you don’t speak terminal, that shits confusing as hell.
And now this story is like smokey the bear. “Only YOU can maintain wifi protocols. Seriously. I’m done. It’s just you now. The professionals are sick of this shit.”
So it’s reasonable that non-techies are like “I had some issues before, but now I’ll have MORE issues if I comd back…I better stick with what I kjow works.”
Meanwhile lemmy users are like “BOOO WINDOWS!!! BOOOO I SAY!!! WHY DON’T YOU JUST UNDERSTAND THE THINGS YOU DON’T GET???”
And thus…you have downvotes for saying logically reasonable things that piss off obsessive types who would downvote each other over which distro is best.
I’m not disagreeing with you, I just want to say, the reason the terminal is helpful in these types of scenarios is never communicated properly in my opinion.
The reason when you ask people for help or Google stuff and get terminal commands back is because they are clear, concise, and reproducible. It’s really hard from the perspective of the people helping, to communicate, usually over text, how to navigate UIs that are ever changing and change depending on the users hardware and setup. This is true for windows too, and it’s why getting any help beyond very simple troubleshooting will devolve into powershell commands.
As for this scenario, it’s just inflammatory on purpose, would anyone mention or care if one person at Microsoft who was a project lead retired after decades of working? There are literally thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel, this is just one of them retiring. A maintainer is only one role in a project and can (and will) very easily be replaced. If not by a volunteer, then in a paid position from one of the many companies that pay developers to maintain the Linux kernel. Regardless, there is already people maintaining the the ath10k, ath11k, and ath12k drivers. This is really just a non issue of a temporary vacancy for one position, the same thing that happens at every single software organization every day.
They’re even defending their decision to because it somehow isn’t relevant to the article enough for them. Its a cult.
But…your comment LITERALLY is based in the fact that switch back to linux would frustrate you BECAUSE OF THE WIFI SITUATION THE ARTICLE IS ABOUT!!!
clearly getting aggitated at life
Humans are stupid.
What boggles my mind is they WANT more people to join them them obliterate anyone who may try to and wonder why no one wants to bother. Like an OS where I’m going to need to learn things is one thing, but one where I need to learn from people like them . . . yeah I see why they don’t have success with people outside comp sci fields.
Lmfao ‘how dare you have an expirence other than Linux is great!’
This fucking site man.
Based on this article? Yeah, the downvotes are appropriate.
This article: Oh no, someone might have to step up and solve this problem in a year or two.
That guy: This is why I can’t use Linux now.
Maybe Id buy that if yall didn’t do the same thing to someone else explaining they have problems too once one of you tried to explain to the previous commenter that his expirence was wrong. You just hate seeing things that dont fit your penguin superiority complex. No matter the context.
explaining they have problems too
They claimed to have problems and need to order their wifi part form a specific manufacturer yet claimed to have built their machine themselves
They’re lying, or so completely clueless about what they’re talking about that they come across as such. That’s why they’re getting downvoted. This is usually why, actually
They claimed to have problems and need to order their wifi part form a specific manufacturer yet claimed to have built their machine themselves
Why would building a rig yourself preclude you from needing to order parts? When people say build a rig it’s usually always them ordering parts isn’t it?
If you built your rig yourself then there’s 0 reason you’d need a specific company’s wifi card. Even if you buy a prebuilt then there shouldn’t be, even
