In short, like anyone else:

He’s absolutely right, and utterly annoying

Re-read your own words. This went from unhealthy to straight-up dangerous.

A bit late tho. This should have been his first reaction, as underlined in the article, rather than coming after losing Marcan and Herbst.

As a Asahi user I am a bit partial to this: the kernel has tons of corporate-backed devs on a stable payroll - Asahi is 100% volunteers, and this shit reminds us of the frailty of it all.

And of the human being behind:

https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/

…After coming in mid-fight with “you are the problem”, acting just like another bickering drama-queen & solving nothing, worsening the situation & prompting actual damage.

“You can ignore the SHA... files if you do not know what they are needed for. They are not important for you.”

…That’s where I stopped reading this.

Seems I gotta try KOReader then, thanks!

Mine is a 2E, the only less-sluggish thing I found I could do was to limit the number of books on it, which seems ridiculous because I have zero PDFs, only epubs & barely using 2.3GB out of 16, and what does it have to do with page turns anyway ?

Ah, it’ll remind me of the times I “hacked” my kindle just to display the cover of The Hitchhiker Guide To The Galaxy :)

It’s my only ereader after owning a paperwhite for years. Yeah, it’s inferior. It sometimes doesn’t register a several good, honest tap or swipes to turn pages ; it’s having hard time making a difference between a swipe to change illumination and one to highlight text ; and sometimes you see some shadow text from other pages on your current page

But kobo do sell some books without DRM, you can sideload without even using calibre, and, most importantly, it’s not an amazon product

Any windows power user or dev on a mac can follow a wiki, read a bit and learn.

Good for beginners? I didn’t describe a beginner right here. Anybody with experience in computing will find arch straightforward and satisfying. Heck, a CS student would probably go through a first install process faster than I do after 5 years.

What are the concept involved? Partitioning, networking, booting… These are all familiar fields to tons of very normal computer users.

Arch can be a good first distro to anyone who knows what a computer is doing (or is willing to learn)

Just by itself ; I checked KOReader on my phone & wasn’t convinced enough to install it on my reader which, beside being that, just works with Calibre from several linux machines (and I don’t mind reading PDFs on my phone, it’s always user manuals and I need fluid zoom + screenshots for diagrams and stuff like that).

I have kept à disconnected kindle for a few years after I completely stopped using amazon for anything - today I wouldn’t even be seen with one as carrying one is a bit like advertising for the company

These are the best ereaders period, my kobo Clara 2e is sluggish, night mode is shit, USB connection to Calibre is “when I want, if I want”… But I’m not a billboard for that business. Too bad, really good devices, and hurray for all the people who will enjoy them away from amazon

Full message from Karol Herbst on LKML:

I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I’m not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer.

Most of the time I simply excused myself with “if something urgent comes up, I can chime in and help out”. Lyude and Danilo are doing a wonderful job and I’ve put all my trust into them.

However, there is one thing I can’t stand and it’s hurting me the most. I’m convinced, no, my core believe is, that inclusivity and respect, working with others as equals, no power plays involved, is how we should work together within the Free and Open Source community.

I can understand maintainers needing to learn, being concerned on technical points. Everybody deserves the time to understand and learn. It is my true belief that most people are capable of change eventually. I truly believe this community can change from within, however this doesn’t mean it’s going to be a smooth process.

The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn’t okay. This isn’t creating an inclusive environment. This isn’t okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can’t be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I can’t in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.

I wish the best of luck for everybody to continue to try to work from within. You got my full support and I won’t hold it against anybody trying to improve the community, it’s a thankless job, it’s a lot of work. People will continue to burn out.

I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn’t continue the work I was so motivated doing as I’ve did in the early days.

Please respect my wishes and put this statement as is into the tree. Leaving anything out destroys its entire meaning.

Respectfully

Karol

Signed-off-by: Karol Herbst