I recently installed Fedora 42 on my 2017 MacBook Air, and aside from everything working well, I'm facing an issue with the camera. It's a Broadcom 720p FaceTime HD Camera, which I found out was supported by the Linux kernel from versions 3.19 to 5.11, but it seems support has been dropped in more recent kernels. I'm curious about this trend of dropping support for older hardware, especially since one of the strengths of Linux is its ability to work on older systems. I found a driver on GitHub that might work, but I'm not keen on messing with system files just for the camera. Overall, I'm pleased with how responsive the laptop feels and how smooth Gnome is compared to MacOS, which makes the transition feel seamless, even if I do miss that camera functionality a bit.
1 Answer
Yeah, Linux does tend to drop support for older hardware eventually. In this case, the specific Broadcom driver that was removed was actually for prototypes and not your setup, so it never would have helped you anyway. Keeping older hardware running can hold back improvements, so it's a balancing act for the developers.
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