In my mind the best long term solution for Debian is if Lenovo are
contributing fixes ourselves - after all we usually know what the fixes
are. We're not technically at the stage where that is doable though -
but it's what I'm aiming for and I'm the trial guinea-pig.
Fantastic! Yes feel free to reach out to me any time if you need some
help. I can give some guidance with Debian procedures or can help you
with sponsoring fixes, patches and package uploads, but what I can't do
is pressure someone in a team to prioritise an issue or force them to
accept a patch that they don't want, but I think in general, people will
be supportive in getting issues solved to get Debian on an OEM laptop
(and fixing these issues in Debian helps for all our existing ThinkPad
users too).
For me the first step would be an understanding that if we propose a
patch then we're doing it for a good reason and it doesn't sit there for
a couple of months.
I did another talk over the last weekend in our first ever online
MiniDebConf where I talked about our patch backlog, we definitely want
to get better at this.
I don't think we're at the stage where you can trust us to merge things
in without review but longer term I'd hope to be a more trusted
community member who can be relied on to deliver quality items. How we
get from here to there is in my mind the challenge - for that we need
support and I appreciate peoples time is limited and very precious :)
Nice! If you're interested, it would be great for you to join us a full
fledged project member too. That takes a lot of work, but in the
meantime we also have a status called Debian Maintainer where you're
allowed to upload some packages without any supervision before you're a
full Debian Developer.
I think we generally care about the hardware that we have, and that our
employers typically buy and deploy. I think "other people's hardware
problems" will always be less exciting than your own. Usually when more
of the latest hardware starts hitting us personally we tend to care
more. I think part of this is just natural.
Agreed. I'm afraid from a Lenovo preload shipping point of view it has
to be the latest HW though and that's a challenge.
If it's any consolation, whilst I have access to a lot of devices I also
have to fight for some HW access. I don't have an X1C8 yet (my colleague
does....I'm not bitter ;)) Getting HW where it needs to be is one of the
big challenges I face generally.
I understand. From a preload point of view, I suppose it's possible to
start off with a subset of laptops that might work well? Or is there a
strong preference from Lenovo to support a wide range from the start (I
noticed that that's what Fedora did, so just wanted to check).