It's not luck. It's hard work by a dedicated group of people who make it happen. 🙏
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Linux Gaming
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Quite possibly significantly this guy - Larry Finger, R.I.P and thanks for your service.
Rembering Larry Finger - Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn
I've had zero problems with linux working with any hardware I have.
But thats mostly because I selected hardware from companies known to have good linux compatability. like AMD, and TPlink
I had that experience yesterday.
I wanted to see if a old fingerprint reader I bought 6 or 7 years ago would work, wasn't expecting it to but lo and behold, it was in the fprint documentation as a supported device and once set up, worked without issue.
The Linux community fucking rules man. So many talented and hard working people make this stuff possible.
Definitely better than Windows lately, which is kinda amusing. Have you tried reinstalling Windows from scratch lately?
A previous laptop I had came with win 11. At first I installed win 10 on it cause I needed that for work, touchpad just would not work. Finding the drivers for win 11 was already almost impossible without installing some shitty device detector program from msi, win 10 versions just did not exist.
Installed Linux on it eventually, and it worked perfectly out of the box.
Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.
I got an old thermal receipt printer, plugged it into the parallel port and echoed some text to /dev/lp0 and it printed. I didn't have to set anything up. I did have to write a simple python script to make it print images though.
yeh years ago, to get Linux working you might need an older computer because the kernels did not catch up yet. Nowadays, I can just buy any new computer and can be sure that 90% of my devices will work with it.
The only problem now is modern standby. Intel and AMD kept fucking up standby mode on laptops.
The only hardware I had trouble with was a 3D Connexion Space Pilot. Linux defaults to seeing it as a tablet mouse or track nub, rather than a 6 axis 3D controller. The Linux download from the site did get it working though.
Hopefully devices like that can more easily be implemented with the plugin support for libinput. It sounds like the poster child for it.
If you haven't seen it, the open source driver for 3d connexion stuff is also pretty good, and I believe might be necessary for blender to work with it. It's also probably packaged in the distro repositories.
Yes I have used it. A while back, and I had to run the app as root. But yeah, I was setting it up for blender use
I have not had luck with vr (oculus. I hear index does better).
Which oculus headset do you have? If its a Quest then ALVR is the way to go. The wired only ones dont really work. If you want to see your desktop in vr, then you can use WlxOverlay-S for that.
Yeah quest 2. I haven't side loaded it or anything yet as it's a shared headset with the SO
I've been keeping Windows to do VR, I didn't realize it was working on Linux too. Index, btw
I have yet to see the devices that don't work in Linux (evidently, there are a few, but I've never used them, so there's that).
Oh just try Internal HDMI Capture cards and you will find so many, even most of them, will not work under Linux at all.
Yeah, I would think so, but again, I've never had hardware fail to work out of the box in Linux, and since I don't use internal capture cards, I guess I will not be affected any time soon.
I've had luck with anything common, if it wasn't recognized immediately there was a driver that I could download. Huion, the makers of a drawing tablet is an example of this, they've packaged their drivers in a .deb or tar.gz! It's super easy to install and use the product you purchase. I honestly find that Ubuntu has the best support for not only proprietary drivers but also stuff like PC components. However, if you are using super fresh PC components and the like, the higher the distro's kernel version, the more likely you'll have better hardware support.
When it comes to esoteric or not a popular bit of tech, I am always careful to do research first before deciding to shell out cash for it. VR support is pretty spotty, but it might get better if more people gamed using that particular tech. I think Linux as it is, has made huge strides in hardware support via kernel upgrades. It's my hope that even more work is put into the kernel to make hardware support seamless for future Linux users.