My first contribution to Linux

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 :-)

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missing feature support at a glance, as well as guides for porting to new devices [2] and porting features from an outdated vendor-provided Linux fork to the upstream kernel [3].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

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.