On the bright side, it’s never been a better time to switch to an immutable distro…

Use Bluefin or some other immutable/atomic distro.

The upside is that it’s rock solid and will likely never fail in a way that cant be easily rolled back. The downside being that it’s slightly more complex to administer than a traditional distro model (which probably isn’t a big problem if you are going to be administering your SO’s PC for the most part.)

Bluefin is basically a more general desktop, less gaming-focused version of Bazzite. Bluefin uses Gnome, but there’s also a KDE Plasma version called Aurora.

That’s really too bad… They are a super talented developer and they were doing something really cool, and making great progress too.

But if they were doing Asahi Linux for fun as a hobby, and if it isn’t fun anymore for a variety of reasons, then you really can’t blame them.

I’m not sure if there is a “right” or “wrong” here, as this is just one person’s side of the story that acknowledges, but mostly glosses over, the possibility that they made mistakes or behaved badly at times too.

But I can absolutely understand the basic concept of burning out because you don’t think your hard work is being appreciated, because people are making hard things even harder for you, or because users on the internet let their excitement about a thing push them too far into being entitled.

Hopefully Marcan can find some time to relax and do fun and rewarding things with their time.

You’re avoiding the point: when you have the source code, the ability to build it yourself, and the right to continue community development in any direction you want, there is nothing that a company or any other entity can do to make your experience worse.

If I don’t like the direction of Lemmy, for example, there’s nothing that stops me from forking the last known good version and continuing to use/develop that myself for the rest of time. It’s fundamentally different than if you’re someone who uses Reddit, for example, and you’re 100% beholden to the whims of what the developers decide. That’s the point I’m making.

Call me a true believer, but I think FOSS is at least extremely resilient to enshittification. I say this as a long time FOSS user and current professional FOSS developer.

I disagree, forking and personal modification are the fundamental powers that FOSS licenses like the GPL and MIT give the user. They’re the whole point of why FOSS exists in the first place–it’s not about money, it’s about giving people the power to chance the source and build things for themselves.

Copyleft takes that idea one step further by asking them to share their changes, of course.

Obviously it’s great if everyone can align their ideas and desires to work together on a single thing, but the software world also benefits from having multiple projects with different directions and goals, because one-size-fits-all is never ideal.

I’m not familiar with either of those projects or what you mean by “that stage”, but why can’t you and the community around them just fork them and continue development in a way that you prefer? What’s stopping you?

What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify that can’t be fixed or mitigated by source modifications or forks?

I don’t get it… What is Ubuntu doing to enshittify their operating system that you can’t mitigate through source modifications or switching to another free OS?

Unlike Windows and Mac users, if my Linux distro does something that I disagree with, I feel that I have plenty of power to do things about it on multiple levels. I left Ubuntu years ago, but there are plenty of things the community can do to make things better without relying on Canonical to do anything at all.

Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.

Ok, but what’s stopping them other than a lack of desire?

FOSS programs can always be forked and developed independently of the original authors. That’s the “freedom” that makes them FOSS in the first place. I have no desire to make my own fork of Android and its tooling, but if someone out there really wanted to do so, I don’t see what is stopping them. (Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)

Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

I’m kind of skeptical of this idea. FOSS has almost always been able to succeed in the long term despite having a small fraction of the development budget of proprietary software, often due to the passion of weekend devs essentially donating their time to the cause. Whether it’s Linux, Blender, Gitlab, Godot, Krita, etc., I can’t think of a single FOSS project that has funding anywhere near the same level as their corporate rivals.

It absolutely does… Can you elaborate on a situation in which FOSS gets enshittified?

Right for the wrong reasons.

Sounds a lot like Linus Torvalds back in the day, just saying…