Until AI puts adobe and oracle out of business I don’t care.

Or just drivers for existing abandoned but perfectly functional Qualcomm SoCs.

Do you mean the firmware blobs? If so, then be aware that the firmware doesn't run in the Linux kernel, and isn't part of it. They get uploaded to the peripheral devices, and run there. They are often encrypted and signed, so even if you reverse engineer them, and understand what they do, you also need the private keys of the vendor to sign and/or encrypt them before the peripheral hardware accepts them...

Yea but you will also install other software like maybe gidhra.

Please make it available for others to use and not have to spend resources to do it again, ideally upstream it.

I have been wanting my fingerprint device working too. Did it require a Claude subscription or would the free plan suffice?

I am not going to defend the unacceptable external costs of LLMs here, namely the environmental destruction and the large-scale rug pull on social contracts for creative people.

But adressing your argument, it is totally possible to rewrite the Claude slop to clean, easy to review software. I guess this would be far less work than to reverse-engineer a driver just from captured USB communication.

(That is just my $0.05, but I think the main problem with AI slop in smaller software is not that the code they generate is completely unreadable, but that the LLM systems tend to break down after a few thousand lines, and that they produce architecturally unsound and often subtly wrong software, which leads to an exponentially increasing amount of technical debt if not continously corrrected by experienced people.)

Good luck finding a malware repository for undocumented proprietary hardware

Reverse engineering is actually a very good use case for LLMs. Its like using a black box to get a different black box to do a trick. It might not be epistemologically sound, but if it can boot the kernel, who cares?

All the subscription models that were primarily chatbots before have first party agentic harnesses now so more people have had positive experiences that they want to share.

Logitech and Razer have great open-source driver support on Linux.

I had very good results with OpenLogi https://github.com/AprilNEA/OpenLogi/

You'll be playing doom on your toothbrush in no time.

But yah maybe. There are mountains of "smart" hardware that demanded cloud, cloud went away, suddenly a brick. I'd love to wire some of that up and give Claude a shot at jail breaking and flashing that kinda thing.