Brief items

The feature driven duct tape engineering mode is progressing massively. Proper root cause analysis has become the exception not the rule.

In our normal kernel development it's just annoying and eats up review capacity unnecessarily, but in the face of a timeline or real bugs it's worse. Aside of wasting time for review rounds, at some point other people have to just drop everything else and get it fixed.

Even if some people don't want to admit it, the increasing complexity of the hardware technology and as a consequence the increasing complexity of the kernel code base makes it mandatory to put correctness and maintainability first and not to fall for the featuritis and performance chants which are driving this industry. We've learned painfully what that causes in the last year.

As long as there are a set of users who aren't getting their needs met by existing options, there's a purpose for any number of distros to exist. Some come and some go, and many are very very niche, but that's okay. I think there's a lot of people who are obsessed with trying to have some dominant player take a total monopoly, but in every other market category, it's immediately apparent how silly that idea is. You wouldn't want a single clothing manufacturer or a single restaurant chain or a single internet provider (wink hint nudge) to have total market dominance. Diversity and choice in the marketplace is good for customers, and I think it's no different when it comes to operating systems.

Rushing to label this as a "good" or "bad" thing can make it easy to miss the underlying and more interesting lessons we can learn here.

Clearly, if everyone was using a Linux-based operating system, that would be a better state of affairs, but if we are overly quick to dismiss the usage of Mac systems as "bad", then we can often fail to understand why people have chosen to adopt the trade-offs of these platforms in the first place.

By not demonstrating sufficient empathy for such users as well as newcomers or those without our experience, we alienate potential users and contributors and tragically fail to communicate our true message. Basically, we can be our own worst enemy sometimes.

As with any other freedom, this kind does not come for free. I'm not talking about paying maintainers, though that seems to be what everyone else is fixated on of late. Freedoms are not won through money. Freedoms are won through the time of every free software developer. Unlike money, when time is spent it's gone forever; there's no chance to earn more later. Too many projects rely on the time of too few maintainers, and those maintainers are devoting too large of a slice of their lives to supporting the projects they love.

Even a hard-core, connected-appliances Luddite like myself is considering an IoT toaster oven now. I refuse to keep an Alexa in my house, and I don't want a Nest relaying my home's temperature back to Google. But sign me up for the dystopia where I one day get toast-doxxed. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and I want the world to know that I take it very seriously.