Technology

Well, "maintainer" is usually a single person job. They didn't write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.

So I mean, it's not great nobody is stepping up, but it's also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux's wifi support single handed, either.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/

There's lots of developers contributing to the wifi drivers, there's just no "lead maintainer" now

The article isn't entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I'd expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.

I hope they invent wireless ethernet

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.

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".

Although I get the thought I would rather everything not centralise to valve and Gabe Newell

WiMax gang rise up

I need to get some Meshtastic modules...

Jeeze. Not everything is doom. Someone else will step up. In fact, they already have started adjusting.

These things happen periodically.

You're being dramatic, the world will collapse before this becomes a problem

It's demographics. Linux contributors & maintainers skew heavily to the older end of the spectrum (and, although not relevant to this point, also skew heavily male).

People who can contribute time to a project for free tend to be older because they are financially and career settled by the time they hit 50s. Raising a family tends not to leave a lot of spare time.

I haven't seen Wireless driver issues in years. Any non arcane devices have drivers and most distros enable most of them in their kernel.

Wireless drivers are in a lot better state than they used to be, printer drivers are very dependent on the brand you have.

IME (YMMV) Brother printers seem to consistently work quite well and Epson printers seem to consistently be shit.