That’s my feeling too.
And I’ll keep surporting them financially whether they get there or not.
But the whole “users act entitled by [insert basic feature]” leads me to believe other issues are clouding Martin’s judgement.
It’s a really wonderful project and it’s great to see the rest of the team deciding to use this event to build an even more resilient organization.
Have it on my M1 MacBook Air and the experience is solid. Sad to see one of the original crew gone. Reading his blog makes it sound like he’s burned out again - it was sad to read both for him and also sad because his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? That’s one of major selling point of the hardware platform. Surprised users wanted external display support? “Can’t you just be happy with what I gave you?” Bit of a strange take that makes me think he probably needs a long break away from something that’s become both too personal and toxic. I’m saying this because I’ve been there and can empathize.
But hey - grateful this project exists. It means Apple Silicon Macs have a much more open future.
I have to respectfully disagree about misconstruing his point. From his blog post:
This points to someone who did a thing because it spoke to them on a “shiny, complex, technical problem” level but without any deep understanding about what those who might use it understand the end goals to be. If I wanted Linux on a laptop with x86 battery life, well that’s mostly a solved problem and that platform has ample support for external displays and connectivity.
So while I truly empathize with Martin feeling “burned out from dealing with entitled users” - having managed a very popular technical open source projects in the past - it’s still indicative of an impedance mismatch between his goals and what others might reasonably infer are the end goals for a project like this.
Again, it sucks because it doesn’t have to be this way. We could all act less entitled. But I also don’t think Martin is all victim here - at the very least he’s also victim of his own expectations. As we all often are - myself first and foremost.
I remember getting on a call with a particularly aggrieved open source contributor who claimed, in no uncertain terms, that it was our duty to take any and all PRs thrown at the project, no matter how poor they were, or how problematic they were to maintain. Again, I think most of us would agree that’s unreasonable, but there it was, stated without irony, and to my face.
It would start to eat at anyone. So again, I’m not faulting Martin here, I’m just expressing some surprise at his own surprise for what seem like perfectly reasonable requests and ones the team did very well to address directly and clearly on Asahi’s main page.