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Asahi Lina, who was working on Apple GPU drivers, has decided to take a break from Asahi Linux development.
She did so through a Bluesky post; she said:
For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. I've paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely. I can't share any more information at this time, so please don't ask for more details. Thank you.
She then added:
If you think you know what happened or the context, you probably don't. Please don't make assumptions. Thank you. I'm safe physically, but I'll be taking some time off in general to focus on my health.
I do not know why she might've decided to step back, so there's no risk of me making assumptions or guesses.
For context, Asahi Lina is a VTuber who's been active for a couple of years, mostly doing lives regarding Asahi Linux development. Some of these were quite popular, reaching 50/60k views.
Now, there is something weird about this story.
This is the Phoronix article about Asahi Lina pausing development. It mentions that it "is a hit to the Linux graphics support for the Apple Silicon GPU especially with the DRM kernel driver not yet being finished and upstreamed as well as still targeting the older M1/M2 hardware generations", which is all fair and correct.
However, if we check the Phoronix forum about this article - where people can post comments - you'll notice that the thread has been changed to a redirect to the forum homepage, making it inaccessible.
Similarly, the comment thread in the Reddit post about the news, in the Asahi Linux subreddit, has also been locked down; no one can add comments now.
There even was a thread in the Linux subreddit, which has since been entirely removed "awaiting moderator's approval". A few hours ago the post was public, which makes me think it was not an auto-mod decision.
Finally, doing some extra background checks - which I will not mention here - I can say that there had been an additional thread created in the Asahi Linux community, which was also quickly removed.
What's up with that? Well, some more work gave me a likely answer to this question. However, it's an answer that puts me in a difficult spot: do I want to report back to you, now that I know that there's a reason for hiding some content? Or should I avoid the topic entirely, and pretend I did not see anything?
After some thinking, I have decided to only partially reveal some of the information I found. Firstly, let's introduce you to the internet cesspool that Kiwi Farm is.
Let me simply read the Wikipedia description, as it's perfect already:
Kiwi Farms [...] is a web forum that facilitates the harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to the deaths of three people who were victims of harassment and died by suicide.
One of the three people whose suicide was tied to this forum is Near, a developer who was known for their work on the video emulator higan. I will not get into details about this specific story, but it's worth noting that Near had some common friends with Asahi Linux developers, and they are the ones who reported the suicide in the first place.
Kiwi Farms decided that they did not have enough proof of the death of Near, and began a harassment campaign against those Asahi Linux developers. They claimed they were lying and acting weirdly, and went on for months about this. When - finally - the death was confirmed, they claimed that Asahi Linux developers were "utterly incompetent" in providing information about it.
I mention this because this is what prompted Kiwi Farm users to start harassing Asahi Linux developers, even outside the scope of the death.
Most importantly - for this article, at least - is that they tried doxxing Asahi Lina, attempting to reveal her real identity. In all of the comment threads that I've mentioned - except for the Phoronix one, which I wasn't able to access - some users were sharing the name provided by Kiwi Farm, which - I think - is why the comments were locked and hidden away.
Now, I have reviewed the evidence that Kiwi Farm (and Reddit commenters) brought to the table, and it's circumstantial.
One thing they did is to pitch down the voice and compare speech patterns and accents. I have listened to the provided audio samples and I have not found the similarity to be that striking, but what do I know.
Other pieces of evidence include Asahi Lina and this other person having similar software configuration and hostname, and Asahi Lina showing a home folder with the name of the other person.
If I had to guess, I would say it's more likely than not that Kiwi Farm is right, but there's no hard proof and they've been wrong before anyway. Regardless, it seems like many platforms decided that it was enough to be considered doxxing, and restricted comments.
Now, in the past Asahi Lina had complained about attempts of Kiwi Farm to dox her. This quote comes from a document where Lina was clarifying her interaction with Luna, another VTuber (a long story in itself, but for another time).
This, finally, brings me to the reason I decided to still make this video in the first place: when I first encountered the doxing, I had no idea it came from a place like Kiwi Farm and sort of assumed it was correct. I was not the only one: I talked with other people who had read the thread, and they were also lacking this context.
Thus, I thought it was important to point out what's behind this type of information. They might even be correct for all we know, but they are brought up by people who specifically try to harass others and are even linked to some suicides. This has been, for me, a reminder of how important it is to be careful when handling these kinds of information publicly.
