Operating at the crossway of Apple’s most recent hardware and Linux kernel advancement, for the advantage of a totally free circulation, was never ever going to be simple. It’s been a particularly tough couple of weeks for Hector Martin, task lead for Asahi Linux, topping off years of what he explains as burnout, user privilege, and political fights within the Linux kernel neighborhood about Rust code.

In a post on his website, “Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead,” Martin summarizes his history with hardware hacking jobs, including his time with the Wii homebrew scene (Team Twiizers/fail0verflow), which had its share of insistent users desperate to play pirated video games. Martin moved his focus, and when Apple revealed its own silicon with the M1 series, Martin composes, “I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project.” This time, there was no jailbreaking and a fairly open, if challenging, platform.

Assistance and contributions came rapidly. The very first 2 years saw fast development of a platform developed “from scratch, with zero vendor support or documentation.” Upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, throughout “practically every Linux subsystem,” was an “incredibly frustrating experience” (focus Martin’s).

Came the users requiring to understand when Thunderbolt, keeps track of over USB-C, M3/M4 assistance, and even CPU temperature level monitoring would appear. Contributions and promises gradually reduced while needs increased. “It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had,” Martin composes.

Martin mentions individual problems, in addition to stalking and harassment, as decreasing overcome 2024, while Vulkan chauffeurs and an emulation stack still delivered. At the same time, problems with pressing Rust code into the Linux kernel were developing. Rust was “the entire reason our GPU driver was able to succeed in the time it did,” Martin composes. Mentioning the Nova chauffeur for Nvidia GPUs as an example, Martin composes that “More modern programming languages are better suited to writing drivers for more modern hardware with more complexity and novel challenges, unsurprisingly.”