hliyan

I came across this breathlessly written article, the beginning of which I will reproduce below, so as to not give its author any more engagement:

Title: "Linux Memory Had One Maintainer for 26 Years. He Just Quit. Now What?"

Subtitle: "One person held the code that runs every Android phone, cloud server, and supercomputer for 26 years. On April 21, he posted one message and then was silent."

Last non-paywalled sentence: "Two weeks later, at a developer summit in Zagreb, the memory management team tried to figure out how to replace him. They couldn’t."

This sounded very alarmist so I did a quick search (note: I'm not a Linux kernel expert or enthusiast by any measure). What I found seemed fairly tame:

Andrew Mortan's transition announcement: https://lwn.net/ml/all/20260421094216.8dfe14a8c62f2420fa5aace1@linux-foundation.org/

May 7 announcement of new maintainer: https://lwn.net/Articles/1070994/

Can someone familiar with the matter confirm that I was right to dismiss the original article as alarmist engagement bait, or is there reason for worry?

This may be an exercise in screaming into the aether, but I wanted to check how many others feel this way (and how strongly) when using modern software:

When opening GMail to send an email, I frequently have to dismiss a banner that tries to upsell a higher service tier that promises to either secure some drive files it claims are insecure, or promises better AI tools to manage my work. When opening a food delivery app, I first have to dismiss a number of promotions before I can get to the ordering screen. Even at work, where I might not be the person who makes purchasing decisions, I'm frequently presented with an itchy red notification dot, or a chirpy popup that breathlessly describes some new feature that came with the last refresh of the tab, no doubt put there by a product manager whose quarterly KPIs include a certain minimum usage of the new feature they championed. There are hardly any software where one can get in, do the thing and get out. And the trend does not seem to be plateauing. Where does this end? Will legislation be required to regulate ads that interrupt people's tasks (personal or work)?