The whole Linux kernel maintainer ban has to do with government sanctions imposed on Russia and certain Russian companies and individuals. Consequently, the whole thing is pretty silly as these maintainers were responsible for certain drivers being supported and contributing to an open source worldwide project for the benefit of everyone that runs Linux or uses the internet. The lack of a quality explanation led to a lot of people protesting as reported below, and then being banned from the project with no coaching or interaction whatsoever. What this means is that we’ll probably see some cracks in driver support as knowledgeable maintainers have been locked out. I’m not sure if related, but I’m having some issues with a couple Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W boards that have flaky WiFi support as I just soldered header pins on them and assembled them to be my new Pi-Hole DNS/Unbound servers. I also saw this same Wifi issue with other Pi Zero 2 W boards when trying to put the new Debian 12 based WPSD software on them. Whatever the case contributors to the kernel are being removed and its a bad look for the management of the project, and Linus is making himself look pretty ignorant as well. I think there is going to be a big future for modified kernels going forward, e.g. the Xanmod and Liquorix/Zen kernels (both of which I currently run on various machines).