As the complexity of our every day devices increase, less and less people are capable of contributing anything meaningful to an OS like Linux, let alone in their free time. It also doesn't help that the abundance of high level languages discourages learning about computer internals in younger generations.

Or that we indeed became softies lol.

Language is very small part of it. For example me contributing a anx7688 driver for pinephone to make convergence work was C coding, yes, but also reading through type-c spec, battery charging 1.2 spec, usb-pd specs, alt-dp specs, and figuring out how it all works from 0 knowledge, to tie all that together on a quirky HW design, with several hardware bugs that I had to discover first, and non-cooperating PMIC/and type-c controller, on 3 different pinephone HW variants.

C coding is the easiest thing. Hard part is figuring out what needs to be done and getting quite detailed understanding of how everything works on HW level, lots of trying and testing with various USB devices in various scenarios. There's also a lot of reverse engineering, because no HW vendor cooperates with random fucks from the internet and gives them free support. :)

So drivers are definitely awesome. But at some point adding some usability for “killer apps” on the mainline phones might pull in significant users.

Killer apps for me are physical keyboard, GUI bootloader that can do multi-boot (so that I can switch between one of the mobile distros and a Xorg based i3wm desktop, because there's no way mobile distros will ever have reasonable performance for convergence use), convergence with accelerated video playback and a reasonably smooth web browsing, possibility to run Arch Linux ARM as is with access to the entire package repository of software (that is not ad laden or spyware by default) on my fingertips, and full control over the security of my phone by being sure I can run my OS without the CPU ever touching any code on any modifiable storage inside the phone,... :) That's already there with original Pinephone.

Those harder classes used to be referred to as weed out courses. Incoming class of 100+ students to Assembler. After 2 weeks, 60%+ drop the class.

I'm currently TA:ing my uni's Introductory Computer Engineering class (from logic gates to assembly). It's not as much of a weed out class as you'd think and yes, it's the first class they take, along side some introductory python. Most of them do seem to hate the assembly part though personally I found the part where you have to actually make an instruction to be much harder when I had to take this class

The pool of programmers has grown. There are more good programmers than ever, but the barrier to entry is also lower. It isn't necessary to pass through that kind of trial by fire anymore.

Yeah, the barrier is lower, many people can write Electron apps now.

I don't think the elitism here is necessary or even the root of the issue of code contributions. The apps currently present in these PinePhone operating systems were developed and are supported by knowledgeable and hardworking PinePhone users, but the fewer developers there are, the more limited the support is.

I don't see anything elitist. Anyone can learn assembly language, C, and even C++ and Rust with a bit more dedication.

Anyway, much of the work getting these phones ready as daily drivers is in getting apps that run on them mature. There are lots of languages adequate for apps.

Or learn Swift or Kotlin, and target iOS or Android instead.

Or even, you know, not.

Though a bit elitist, his comment isn't discouraging anybody, and does hold some truth in that getting closer to the hardware allows you to do things you can't do otherwise.

I feel like it's unfair to disparage him as harshly as that.

What's elitist in learning a craft properly? Working with a higher level language doesn't mean that learning C, C++, algorithms, data structures and a bit of math isn't terrible useful.