Better Linux Support For The Samsung Galaxy Book Laptops With New Driver Coming

For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux.

The forthcoming Samsung Galaxy Book driver is for supporting various laptop features not otherwise exposed under Linux. This driver interfaces with the Samsung SCAI ACPI device to interact with extra features of the hardware.

This driver that covers most Samsung Galaxy Book laptop models in turn enables keyboard backlight controls, a performance mode option via the ACPI Platform Profile handling, battery charge controls and threshold support, various setting attributes, handling of function "Fn" keys, and tracepoint support for ACPI device communication debugging.

Not currently supported by this driver but potentially to be supported in the future after further investigations are the Dolby Atmos speaker mode, the "Outdoor Mode" handling, and the "Silent Mode" found on select models.

This Samsung Galaxy Book Linux driver isn't the work of Samsung, sadly, but rather thanks to open-source developer Joshua Grisham tackling this driver.

Those interested in this samsung-galaxybook platform driver that is under review can find the tentative driver code on the platfomr-driver-x86 mailing list.