Realtek ALC215 / ALC285 / ALC289 Support Coming To Linux 4.13

[starshipeleven]

Who do I talk to to get this fixed: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195049 (laptop speakers don't work, subwoofer does though)

I'm not sure if Realtek on Windows is doing anything else to get the audio working on this laptop, but changing those 3 verbs activate the speakers.

You need to set up bounties on bug bounties sites or find other ways to get freelance developers to care about your issue.

[thesandbender]

To be fair dev's don't have endless supplies of hardware to test with. I doubt they will help but I'd bug Dell about it. They do provide linux support for other hardware so who knows maybe they can point you to someone who could help.

This. To make matters worse sometimes large OEM's like Dell, HP, etc will get components with custom firmware or even tweaked circuitry which makes it pretty much impossible for someone to fix the problem without physical access to the equipment. Documentation helps but even then you really want physical equipment to test it on because sometimes the documentation is wrong or incomplete. If you have something that you really, really need supported ask for help fixing it on a related mailing list, web forum or irc channel. If it's something like a headphone jack not working chances are the fix is 10-20 lines of code, the challenge is more in finding the problem, not fixing it. If you feel you don't have a strong enough background in C and building a kernel to do that then offer to loan the equipment in question to someone who does, you'll usually find someone willing to help. Just remember that most linux developers do it in their spare time and expect it to take some time, ask them for an estimate.

[pmorph]

After using Linux for 20 years I thought basic functionality like headphone jack is now WORKING everywhere and such a trifle is no longer an issue, therefore YES I was fully expecting it to work, obviously I was wrong and Linux on the desktop is still in the "consider yourself lucky if everything works on your hardware" phase even after 26 years.

There is no financially viable reason for majority of PC HW vendors to hold back a release until "everything works" with linux. It's the same it was 20 years ago, so I'm not sure what made you expect otherwise?

[GI_Jack]

You are the one living under a rock. In Windows, there is always a vendor driver for any hardware ever released. All that needs to be done is to download it from the manufacturer's site, double-click the EXE and it's all done.

Except when it doesn't. I've spend days hunting down .exe's for windows. I've also spent hours waiting for windows update to run, and re-run, and then run again. Sometimes the .exe is on the vendor's site, if the hardware is new enough. Sometimes you need to jump through hoops to get it. Sometimes you need to sign up, sometimes the driver doesn't really work correctly. Sometimes the vendor makes you download some tool that may or may not work.

Sometimes you have to spend hours downloading a dozen individual .exe files, and then sometimes the .exe crashes on install, or fails for whatever reason.

If on the rare occasion you need to install a driver on linux, its generally just a package for your distro, which just decompresses and copies some files.

I have done just that on a 10-year-old Acer notebook with CrossFire and a Broadcom wifi card on Windows 10. The latest version of the kernel and the most up to date distributions can't even get those two most important components running after 10 years.

I rarely have had driver issues in the last 5-7 years. Including broadcom. Especially with notebooks. Broadcom you might need the firmware for the old 43xx cards, but it works perfectly, and there is a tool for that. The amount of unavailable drivers for linux are very few and far between these days.

Oh, and they almost all work really well and don't hang the box.