As the number of students on our team grows, one of the bottlenecks we face is the limited number of computers we have with access to install software. We are able to provide Chromebooks at near free cost through some sponsorship. They allow Linux programs to be installed on them which allows us to install WPILIB and VSCODE to do Java and C++ development. The place they fall short is with the FRC Driverstation which inherits Windows only dependencies through being built on LabView and using XInput.
I am wondering what it would take for the FRC Driverstation to be refactored such that it could officially support non-windows machines. The FRC community has implemented its own workarounds whether by developing there own driver stations (See QDriverStation) or by trying to run the official version through services such as WINE (See post). These are obviously not without their issues and perhaps dangerous. I am wondering if NI is or would be willing to consider a new version of the DriverStation that would have native support of Linux and MacOS? I am certain there are several members of the community (including myself) that would be willing to provide assistance either through beta testing or code contributions if the protocols can be made open source.
Cheers,
Bart
