Some devices using this wifi driver had troubles already with beta. Frmware was only loading under certain conditions. @waddlesplash updated drivers in nightlies solving most problems but IIRC some people reported regressions. It might be one of them.
I agree for drivers we need documentation first.
For hardware, what about asking the people who would like a driver for their hardware to be tested, to send that hardware to the developer during the development and testing phase?
Itâs a seducing idea but it doesnât work in practice. First reason are transport fees that are sometimes exceeding the device price. Then comes a question of manpower ; people are sending more devices that you can handle. And there are also some devices that you canât make working ; too proprietary so, no drivers you could port, no docs to write one of your own, etc. Even when you can do it, reverse engineering windows drivers is also very time consuming. At the end, it is only possible for few cases.
Also before adding more drivers you need the underlying architecture to be well defined or you end up with a different driver for each existing device. For example, graphic cards need an unified way to handle multiple monitors whatever the brand.
People have already donated hardware, with no requirements attached, but the implication that someone would find it interesting enough to write drivers.
I currenly have a Blueray reader, a DVB-T receiver, and a Via motherboard for embedded system with a gps receiver on a mini-pci slot (very obsolete). That latter one is owned by Haiku inc and developers keep âgifting itâ to each other every few year.
There are also various ARM boards and a PowerPC one owned by other devs in similar situations.
If you want a dev to actually work on a device, you have to actually hire them to do so. That will cost a lot rore than the cost of the hardware itself in many cases.
I will be back to trying to find time to work on the drivers needed to use some of my current laptop now (sd card reader, souncard, webcam and touchpad for basic use, but also infrared scanner, fingerprint reader, smartcard reader, neural network accelerator, dual or triple display, usb audio on the docking station, âŚ) as you can see, the problem isnât really on the side of giving access to hardware to the developersâŚ