Original question by @[email protected]
I never really see hardware lacking Linux support mentioned, which got me caught by surprise when a computer with a Broadcom network card couldn’t use the card. What other hardware don’t work with Linux?
A lot of Broadcom cards are supported, so you either have a missing driver/firmware blob or some really bad luck.
Historically, phone line modems were very often unsupported (some people may remember the term “winmodem”), but hardly anyone uses them anymore, so the problem has effectively gone away. Older consumer-grade printers that didn’t speak Postscript, ditto. I own a very old TV capture card of the analog type that has never been supported, but probably won’t work with modern Windows either.
Modern hardware is more likely to be supported unless it’s too niche to attract developers, or too bleeding-edge for its protocol to have been reverse-engineered yet.
My Nvidia wont sleep/wakeup on my desktop. I generally stick to Intel where I can, which will probably be my next gpu.
Yeah, it’s really hard to find WiFi 6 hardware with reliable Linux support (brostrend.com has good support). It used to be that things like sport watches required apps to configure and only Windows was supported but nowadays most will be configurable using Android. Most common hardware (cameras, card readers, external drives) use USB now so it’s hard to find something without support.
What’s even worse is when it “supports” it but in a way that’s so unusable broken it’s better to just not support it at all.
I tried Linux on my old laptop with an Intel AX201 card. For the longest time it wouldn’t constantly connect to 5ghz, try to swap to 6, then 2 seconds later fall back to 5. WiFi was basically unusable on that laptop unless I turned off 6ghz. Even then speed was only half what it should have been.
Depends on what you mean by “hardware”. Most microcontrollers can’t. There are a bunch of ancient processor architectures that modern Linux doesn’t support either, and more esoteric setups that no one has bothered to port Linux to.
While broadcom does have Linux support, their older wireless adapters can suck my nuts.
My laptop has a speaker amp and a fingerprint reader that both lack Linux support. I had to quit using Linux on it because it was annoying without them working.
Some DACs have Windows only official drivers…
I have an Akai EIE Pro that I have not been able to use, though it seems there are experimental user made Linux Drivers I have not tried to compile yet.
I’m not sure this is the right question. Shouldn’t it be what hardware is not supported by Linux? Most of the time it’s the Linux (kernel) developers who create the drivers for hardware support since companies still seem of the opinion that they only need to support Windows, with some exceptions to the rule?
Am I mistaken in this?
The RailDriver train simulator controller only has official Windows support.
After reading the technical documentation from the makers, I cobbled together a “driver” that reads input messages then puts it out as a virtual device like an xbox controller.
With two translation layers, and with calibration required every time, I am able to play TrainSimWorld with it, because out of the box it can’t seem to recognize it.
