This is going to be a short post, but I have decided to take a break from my Freedesktop SDK-related FOSS activities. Lately, certain things have become a bit overwhelming for me, and I think I need some time for myself.

I wrote a bit earlier about the various frictions I’ve been having with other Freedesktop SDK maintainers. While none of those issues have been resolved, I keep finding myself in situations where I have to argue or fight alone against what I think are ridiculous proposals. For example, removing shell and coreutils from Flatpak runtimes, or repeatedly introducing major breaking changes to satisfy some professional use cases at the expense of large breakages and year-long cleanups to fix them.

At points, I was publicly shouted at in all caps or told to “take a holiday” for making certain decisions that I thought were in the overall best interest of everyone.

These are far from the only examples I can remember right now but I’m also not in the mood to dig around.

On top of that, I constantly have to deal with a barrage of AI slop pull requests, argue with people from within about why those should not be accepted, and push back against a bunch of other different things.

At the end of the day, I am spending my limited free time doing all of this while increasingly having to fight an army of people who are paid to do the same, and I am simply unable to dedicate entire days for months on end to fight with people.

I have effectively maintained most of these projects alone for one, two, three, or even four or more years, so I do not think it was or is unreasonable to expect some autonomy, trust, and respect for my decisions. These are not some extraordinary concepts either, it exists elsewhere out in the open.

Over the last six or so years, I’ve tried to take decisions that I believed would benefit everyone else and would ensure stability and sustainability. I was neither paid nor incentivised to do any of it, and none of them were for my own benefit. I don’t regret any of it and I will still stand firmly by every one of them.

I’m not sure what will happen next. Maybe I’ll spend time watching shows, listening to music, or getting back into games to use up the extra free time. I never really had the free time to create any personal projects either and also as I thought it would be more worthwhile to help with other projects instead. I may change that now too.