Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix
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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.
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Thank you for correction!
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Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell
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The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon.
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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
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Does it have to be a Business can it not be Steve who lives in Nebraska?
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Did you try asking Steve? He won’t return my calls
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Unfortunately, relying on individuals is what caused the problen in the first place.
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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.
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It's better if the titular Steve isn't from US. Right now at least.
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Steve burned out a long time ago after all the free work he did on top of his day job.
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And Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD. Or probably several others as well.
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Post in addition to the link.
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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. 🤮
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It turns out people switch jobs, retire, or just burn out. Other maintainers can cover while they select a new one.
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Except OP.
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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.
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That's great! Any idea who?
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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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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.
