We Are Sad to Hear the Story of Jonathan Riddell, Champion of KDE and GNU/Linux on Desktops/Laptops
He used to joke you'd have to be crazy to try to make GNU/Linux mainstream; but he tried anyway
At this very moment I am running a distro made by Jonathan Riddell et al. He lives not far from me. He seems like an awesome person. He was subjected to a lot of abuse from corporates, at least from what I could gather a decade or so ago. I don't know the details well enough to comment and don't remember them. It was about Canonical's relationship with KDE.
My wife has respect if not admiration for Jonathan's persistence. She read his article with sadness. She decided not to put that in her site because she thought it was "too personal". Later on, separately and independently, I stumbled upon the same. I started reading and could not look away, as I found it worrying and there were some bits there that I could relate to (I later added a link to that in the wife's site and in our IRC primary channel, then in -social).
So what did Jonathan say? Well, he's stepping away. He endured some struggles. Probably the saddest part of this: "Then I started to get sad, being cut off from my life for the last 25 years was too much for me. All things come to an end and I’ve seen plenty people had to leave KDE because the money ran out or maybe they had a disagreement with someone in the project, but never a profiteering control struggle like this. I struggled to get out of bed on some days."
Jonathan has given so much and has received so little (in relative terms). I've seen so many people come and go, more so in KDE. Rarely do you find and barely can you name people who spent over 20 years working on KDE (there are few).
Jonathan alludes several times to Tech Paladin, which is basically like a 'hack' for being paid by Valve (DRM) for work on KDE. The founders of Tech Paladin are OK-ish people, there's no need to slag them off, but they have a growing role (also financial) in KDE and given that Steam Deck uses a distro with KDE, and there are many millions of users of that distro, there's concern that many graphics/kernel developers would get 'poached' by Valve (e.g. from Intel) to work on proprietary gaming stuff, not user-liberating 'freedom platforms'.
I hope that Jonathan will change his mind. Sometimes people don't realise how much they miss something or need something until they stop. Then they feel emptiness and "come back" (to a lot of folks retirement is like that).
I have enormous respect for Jonathan and everything he has done (many people feel the same way), including Kubuntu and Neon.
I don't wish to use the word "burnout" or "personal struggle" here; from what I can gather, there's a power struggle somewhere in there or corporate intervention of some kind. There are external factors. So I see Jonathan as a victim, not a casualty, and one that I hope can rise again like a phoenix in a few months (or years). █