Hi,
thanks for the initiative! From my POV there have been significant contributions from community members, not only in terms of mods but also features that have already made it into production. Some of these are huge and mainly driven by people who successfully scratched their own itch. Some examples (tell me if I forgot something):
- Trackball improvement with bearings
- LPC SPI / Battery status kernel module (this is shipping, but not well enough integrated in the desktop)
- Clean Debian integration (remember how we shipped custom mesa in /usr/local ? Nowadays you can just
apt upgrade) - Sleep/power saving for keyboard MCU and LPC
- 9front Port
- Genode Sculpt OS Port
Moreover, based on feedback and reviews, we as MNT shipped a bunch of improvements/additions this year:
- Steel port covers
- Protected battery boards (batch 1 just arrived, shipping next week)
- Continuous testing and feedback to the etnaviv and VPU driver developers, resulting in higher performance, less bugs and h264+now h265 decoding
- Keyboard firmware refactoring and media keys
- OSHW USB Camera (will ship later this month or latest in January)
- OSHW Standalone Keyboard
The most anticipated updates are of course CPU modules with better performance and RAM. These are the most complicated and time consuming projects. I could always use help here from skilled KiCAD engineers and kernel hackers, but these people usually already have enough other things on their plate. I can post more about the status of these later.
I also always have smaller things on the TODO lists that are maybe more feasible for community members to tackle. If people are interested in helping out, I can share these from time to time.
Some examples:
- The keyboard had a low battery alert in the beginning, that stopped working at some point. Bring it back, and also integrate a low battery alert in the OS. A few times I had Reform turn off on me while watching a movie–forgot to plug in the power brick.
- Port the HDMI Audio driver from the vendor kernel (imx8mq).
- If the keyboard is woken up during deep sleep (when the machine is off), I’m not sure if it goes to sleep again automatically (LPC does it, I think). Investigate+fix this.