Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix
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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.
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The likely alternatives are Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon.
And Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD. Or probably several others as well.
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Oddly xkcd's image has no signature or other information identifying the creator.
Post in addition to the link.
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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. 🤮
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Jeeze. Not everything is doom. Someone else will step up.
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.
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Make linux your wife and then everyone will be happy.
Except OP.
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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.
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Other people stepped up like within a day.
That's great! Any idea who?
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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.
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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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.
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Other people stepped up like within a day.
Where did you read that? I only saw Johannes Berg saying he couldn't maintain that stack too, after three days.
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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.
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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".
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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?
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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.
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Other people stepped up like within a day.
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.)
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WiFi is a fad anyways.
If you can't bite it, it doesn't exist.
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If you can't bite it, it doesn't exist.
Weird that’s what my girlfriend says.
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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.
It's a Netgear Nighthawk AXE3000
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The future of Foss is in corporate time donations for projects that are useful for them. Open software collaboration is one hell of an efficiency gain. Whenever me or my colleagues have dead time I ask them to work on improving open source projects. It's just a few days every few months but it adds up. Also we like to fix bugs in Foss software that affects our customers as we usually fix and upstream them and can bill that to the customer. So the company gets played, the worker gets payed and open source gets funding. No more sole maintainers for life that don't have money to heat their homes because nobody donates.
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