The end of a story the beginning of a new one
1. Initial motivations and goals
When the switch originally released in 2017 I had only one thing in mind at the time. To make an affordable multipurposes linux tablet.
In 2017 the market for “powerful” Linux tablet was not what it starts to be today.
After some researches and seeing the great work done at the time in the different hacking scenes of the switch I decided to try out Painless Linux (I was maybe there before but my memory doesn’t serve me well)
It was already awesome as a proof of concept but definitely lacking.
After hearing about RetroNX and joining them early 2019 and after my own experiments I started to get serious and involved in a project called Switchroot.
This was the beginning of a great story.
After a talk with a very good friend of mine who at the time was a RedHat aficionado, he questioned me about the possibility to see Fedora happen on the switch.
This marked the beginning of Fedora L4S.
This part of the stroy will be cut there because it is not the point of this article. I can possibly make another article later explaining more the backbone of my participation to switchroot and L4S branching.
2. Experimenting
During the years 2019, 2020 and 2021 I discovered the wonderful world of OS, kernel, bootloader, baremetal, hypervisors, <insert other fancy technical keywords for name dropping knowledge>
The experiments that I did with various OS is what ended up landing me a job in April 2024, while I was undergoing a lenghty lung surgery (yes I was hired in the hospital room, although remotely).
3. Stabilizing
Starting from 2023 and onwards, after the above mentioned life turning events I decided to take another life path, both personally and professionally. As such I decided that the reason I initally jumped into this whole train would turn into a quest, to stabilize and Fedora L4S and make a must use OS.
4. Going further
With massive improvments to the BSP scripts and configs to greatly speed up boot, switching from OBS (OpenBuildService) repository to Copr, adding extreme OC from NaGa’s kernel, including support for Taki’s Super5 OLED screens, and much more as well as specifically crafted theme and better UI/UX the year 2025 and 2026 closed a chapter for L4T in the best way I could think about in the past difficult years.
5. What’s next ?
As life taught me this project has and is reflecting more of me than I would admit it myself. My dedication, sweat, blood and tears put into it came to fruition in more ways than I could count.
L4T kernel will get subsequent update on F42 as long as mainline and NVK are not mature until it will get replaced, but the soul of the project will remain and will be preserved both by the seniors, the current and newer generations of developers coming into this project.