rah

I was a Windows kernel developer

LOL your experience in Windows driver land is in no way transferrable to Linux driver land.

It is the Norm for PCs

You mean for PCs running Windows. Which is not what we're talking about.

Are there any designated out-of-band channels to communicate in case the server goes down?

I'm speaking from the perspective of the IP owner who writes the driver and manufacturer who puts together all the components.

As am I.

And I'm sure the drivers would get mainlined.

That's not the norm.

Intel

Intel is huge and employs shit loads of Linux developers. Most vendors, who will be much smaller, don't. For example, Realtek, who stick a crappily written driver in a tarball on their download page and call it a day. Or any of the hundreds of silicon vendors (such as NXP, Nvidia, Rockchip, Allwinner, Realtek again, Qualcomm, etc., etc.) with "BSP"s who give their customers a 500GB package containing, among lots of proprietary userland shit, some butchered horror show based on Linux 3.3 with no git history.

I can't imagine why you would expect drivers to be mainlined by a vendor.

They are going to write the Linux driver and say, "put this in your handheld."

That would be terrible. They shouldn't be giving their customers a driver, they should be sending their driver to mainline and telling their customers "Use any version of Linux after 6.<whenever their driver was committed>".

let you

🙄

"poor engineering" you mentioned:

None of those assert that the poor engineering is due to not using a particular distro's packaging system. Because I have asserted no such thing.

You got your info.

I did not.

This

That doesn't mention harassment at all.

this

That only mentions harassment of them and their family incidentally, I can't see any mention of harassment as a reason for quitting the project or in fact related to the project in any way.

This doesn't provide any insight into the problems young people are facing, only the consequences.