Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
You zoomers should try installing Solaris then write a kernel module for your wifi card.
Why? None of that sounds like a pleasant experience.
That’s because it is not :) especially since many WiFi card vendors do not give documentation so writing a driver for it is basically impossible.
I’m learning to write kernel device drivers, are you saying that it is possible to write your own wifi drivers …
How common is it for manufacturers to provide the necessary wifi chip information?
You can even write your own OS from the ground up. Everything is possible with enough time and reverse engineering. But is it a good idea? Usually not.
Buy a gallon of acid and spend the next 30 years writing your own version of TempleOS
Can you write your own kernel module for your WiFi card without sneaking into Broadcom headquarter to stole the internal product documentation?
Not a zoomer but this is my dream proficiency in computers, it’s like saying ‘I will build my own habitat’.
One of my first memories with Linux was getting the same X config from a Sun Workstation at school onto my Linux box at home. Just seeing similar behaviour made it seem like my computer was suddenly more powerful. In the 90’s, I got an actual copy of Solaris ( in the box ) and I felt like one of the global elite. One of the first things I did after making real money was buy a Sun Ultra.
Now, I can essentially get Solaris for free and I cannot even be bothered to install it. I want to say that the hardware still interests me but honestly I have no desire to use that either. It would be more of a decoration and act of preservation, like a classic painting hanging on the wall.
If anything, the fun project these days might be to create a WiFi card that had a PicoPi or MilkV board on it running Linux as the firmware. Open Source has really changed the game. What makes old hardware fun is modding it to do stuff it never could. The software that is fun to run on old hardware is something still being actively developed—again, maybe Linux.
I thought Solaris has run on x86 for like over a decade now. Maybe almost 20 years?
no
Last time I used Solaris, that thing locked itself if someone casually unplugs the keyboard. Good luck with the WiFi card! 🤣
lol you could hot swap memory cards on those sparc boxes. Not sure what you were doing with your keyboard.
Old sunfire were fun.
I’m kind of a generalist in terms of interest in the IT sector and have a surface level understanding of most things (professionally I’m just a fullstack webdev), one big crater in my knowledge is about how drivers work, really want to do something like this in my free time (next year because I’m pretty much drowning in tasks now). The closest (but still pretty far) to this I’ve done is write a small service that increases / decreases volume through pulseaudio based on ACPI events (windows tablet volume buttons weren’t working properly under linux).
Reading my comment back, excuse my writing style (too many brackets lol).
Good luck with that! It’s basically just playing around with memory and some constructs inside it. The kernel docs for Linux suck balls though if you have no idea about that stuff and/or are new to kernel-level programming. That’s where I learned to love the Microsoft documentation.
Maybe pick up a microcontroller and write a driver for so a device can connect with it? I had great fun writing an Hitachi LCD driver for the Arduino. You can get an arduino for like 5 bucks on aliexpress or you buy an even cheaper MC and play around with that.
Install Slackware and purchase random card from aliexpress, and you might just have to.
And once you do that, remember to de-blob your kernel (and re-write every piece of non-free software, although I suppose Slackware doesn’t tolerate proprietary software much) and statically link it to exactly the binaries you need.
Comes close to customisation but leaves out the pain of having to write drivers.
Can I start with Gentoo or is that too easy?
There are wifi dongles with the seller having devs compiling the Linux drivers available on Amazon. I used to use one back when I had to rent places where I was far away from the modem. I would give it away for free if I knew someone who needs it and lives near.