Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm.

Hans de Goede during his 17 year tenure at Red Hat worked on improving the Intel web camera support in recent years, improving x86 tablet support with the mainline kernel, occasionally dabbling with the open-source graphics drivers, improving VirtualBox driver support, and countless other Intel/AMD Linux laptop improvements and various other kernel enhancements to benefit hardware support on Linux. A quick search shows 124 articles on Phoronix news articles where I’ve brought up Hans de Goede’s contributions by name.

Again, he along with Intel’s Ilpo Järvinen are the two maintainers of the x86 platform drivers subsystem. In addition to all of his platform-drivers-x86 contributions, he is also the maintainer within the Linux kernel for some hardware monitoring drivers, Wacom serial tablets, VirtualBox guest drivers, the PI3USB30532 USB-C MUX driver, the Intel XHCI role MUX driver, the Intel Atom ISP staging driver, various Omnivision sensor drivers for web cameras, the Microsoft Surface hardware platform support, and more. He’s done a hell of a lot for Linux x86/x86_64 especially.

When hearing he was departing Red Hat I figured he was likely to end up at AMD, Intel, or perhaps the likes of Meta or even Microsoft. He’s begun contributing via his new work email address and it turns out he’s now at Qualcomm over in the ARM64 world.

Via new patches sent out this week, it turns out he’s working at Qualcomm on the Linux kernel.

Hans at Qualcomm is good news for Snapdragon laptops and the like on Linux but a possible setback now for Intel/AMD Linux laptop support moving forward. Thankfully there are more active Linux kernel contributors at AMD and Intel and other x86_64-connected vendors than years ago, but part of where Hans focused a lot of efforts over the years were in areas typically less of focus to the vendors such as the Atom ISP code when Intel divested away from it, various x86 tablets past the useful product life/support by the vendors, etc.