[pankalog]

If I had no problem with devoting the time and money, contributing to the kernel (especially in a topic as obscure as making the extra buttons work on a 20-year-old laptop) is at the top of my bucket list, and I am definitely going to be doing it in the near future when my calendar clears up a bit.

Exquisite write-up and OP's simple writing has a motivating ring to it, and I'm now on the local used marketplace looking for pieces of tech like this :-)

[MaKey]

What I did was buy a wifi router with a chipset supported by OpenWrt but with no build target yet. One of the OpenWrt maintainers then guided me in what I had to do to get the info he needed for a patch. I followed his instructions, he wrote the patch and there it was, a new build target. Later I wrote a patch myself to fix the LED control. It was a rewarding and educational experience. Later I even found someone using OpenWrt on the router I helped get supported which put a smile on my face.

[a96]

Nice! That's something I've kind of thought I should try one day. Unsupported routers aren't exactly hard to come by these days.

[antonok]

If you want to find devices that still need hardware support under Linux, I highly recommend trying to get a mobile Linux distribution to work on an old smartphone or tablet.

postmarketOS in particular has a really good devices page [1] showing missing feature support at a glance, as well as guides for porting to new devices [2] and porting features from an outdated vendor-provided Linux fork to the upstream kernel [3].

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device [3] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining

[Imustaskforhelp]

I genuinely want to work on postmarketOS but I don't have the technical know-how right now but one day.

I would prefer a sort of dual-boot or just a simple ability to run linux in "android phones"

Like, if we were to build a linux phone somehow hacking it through a raspberry pi or the alikes, they would be so much more costly and subpar.

Android phones have whole globalization working on it and the only reason why they don't work is lack of drivers support/software side, something which can be worked on.

I think if society rewards something like PostMarketOS more/make it easier to install it, then things can be so great as well.

I know I can run a terminal inside android but till now it was only possible through qemu which had its issues...

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-app-...

I am not sure but I have never really appreciated having linux run inside a vm, I'd much rather run something like waydroid in a postmarketOS phone than linux inside android in an ideal world technically speaking from strictly performance but we don't live in one and installing waydroid on postmarketos or even installing postmarketos can be a very huge issue whereas installing linux on android can be a single step with termux or userLand.

[mercenario]

I'm actually trying this right now, but it is becoming much harder than I expected. The fact that I keep needing to recompile kernel and rebooting device doesn't help. I'm trying to make the display and touchscreen work consistently on a qualcomm soc.

And the pmos wiki is severely lacking IMHO.

[dmurray]

I feel most laptops still don't work completely out of the box with Linux, so you don't have to hunt for old hardware.

Maybe you won't find an issue as simple as fixing a button, though.

[leakycap]

> Maybe you won't find an issue as simple as fixing a button, though.

Every laptop I've used with linux has had a few non-functioning buttons and keys. I think you underestimate the widespread issue.

[akdor1154]

Yep, it definitely is well above 'basememt full of model trains' on my (sadly far-off) list of retirement activities.

[kees99]

That's the spirit! :-)

By the way, delving into obscure and hardware-specific kernel code, sometimes yields quite interesting generally-applicable problems. For example, @dougg3 did an (excellent!) series of articles about his work on bringing mainline kernel support to "Chumby 8", a somewhat obscure, but historically significant piece of hardware, and as a side-quest he stumbled into this:

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/04/why-is-my-cpu-usag...

...which is applicable to quite a few other machines.