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?
Fingerprint sensor on most laptops
This has been a real issue yeah.
And Elan touchpads if you are unlucky enough to own one.
Not technically hardware itself but Nvidia + Intel hybrid graphics have never really worked for me
That was a nightmare I’ll never recover from. That laptop is now running windows 11. It’s what made me promise myself to never ever touch Nvidia ever again. I’m now all Red on my desktop and life is so much better.
Similar story here. I had a laptop running nVidia/Intel dual graphics for a few years and it was so fucking finicky. Primusrun this, optirun that. Ugh. Once upon a time, whenever I heard the word Optimus, I thought of transforming trucks with laser guns. Hearing that same word now puts me in a fetal position.
To any GeForce owners that are considering going Linux full time: do a test run first and see how it works out, because nVidia support on Linux is spotty at best.
Yes, that and bbswitch. Never got it working.
So far I’ve been playing with Linux on my old work laptop and they’ve been playing together nicely. Almost everything else about the laptop? No. But hey at least graphics works.
A common issue with those hybrid graphics is that it simply doesn’t switch and only uses one. Are you sure you’re not just using either integrated graphics or your dedicated GPU all the time?
Oh trust me, I know pretty quickly when that 3080 turns on and when it turns back off. Hybrid graphics is what I’ve been fiddling with the most.
I just bought a laptop yesterday (NVD GPU+AMD APU), and graphics hybrid work just fine for me, maybe AMD is that good that it make NVD GPU work on Linux.
Some MediaTek WiFi cards are not supported. I had to replace one in a laptop.
Mediatek chips sucks anyway
Yeah I got a USB wifi dongle that’s a bit tricky. It doesn’t work out of the box in most distros but there is drivers for it that do work, fairly well.
I replaced a Realtek one because it constantly dropped connections. Luckily, this was one of the type of fixes that actually turned out to be easier than it looked.
Not going to surprise anyone but Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets aren’t great on Linux, at least with controllers
Although that is improving!
For the curious https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/hardware/#xr-devices according to which quite a few WMR VR HMDs are supported via the Monado SteamVR plugin.
At least when I tried it 2 years ago, Meta Quest 2 PCVR wasn’t really great on Linux either.
nvidia cards are always giving people grief, especially on Wayland. Technically supported but practically not recommended if you want an easy time
I always hear this, but I’ve been using Nvidia with Linux since 2004 and have never had any issues.
I’ve had mixed experiences myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it randomly breaks. I just wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants it to “just work” and be stable and not do maintenance. For me, I’m someone who’s happy to do maintenance, but I don’t want that to extend to my graphics card, which in this day and age ought to just work.
If you have a GTX 10xx card or later, their are virtually no issue with Wayland anymore. I have two PC with nvidia cards and had almost 0 issue with gnome plasma and hyprland in the last two years.
i have more problems with them on x11 honestly
Sadly I bought my PC before switching to Linux was on the agenda. And I don’t have the money to change to AMD.
Don’t be too sad, I’m playing and working daily with an NVIDIA for years now and it’s just working.
the new one😂
I am surprised to unable to find this type.
Honestly, Linux has better support for the old hw, even better than m$ win.
Depends. If you have a 32bit CPU, app support is surprisingly much worse on Linux than on Windows. While the kernel and core systems still support 32bit, there are a ton of apps that are only offered for 64bit Linux while 32bit Windows support is still available.
One example: Anything running on Electron.
My two biggest issues have been HDR and simulation hardware.
It’s been a good few years since I’ve tried it but every time I’ve tried HDR my saturation just gets cranked to 11 and it looks like those nature photos that are edited to hell and back. Not sure why, and I’ve heard other people got it working so idk. I think it’s just the Nvidia drivers doing their thing and not working.
But controllers for flight and racing Sims are the biggest headache to get working. And then when you do get them working you’ll have issues with games running well and detecting them (I think this is actually due to proton/lutris), issues with force feedback, issues with the various buttons and sliders that aren’t the primary axis. And then, after you spend hours getting them to work, it’ll just break again the next time you want to play. My sims and FPS games are the only reasons I still have a windows install.
Probably not the kind of hardware you’re thinking of but I have an old Roland synthesizer, an Edirol SD-90, that did not work on Linux. Now, I didn’t expect it to given the hoops I had to jump through just to get it to work on modern windows. So Linux seemed out of the question already. But can be a big deal depending on what you use your computer for.
iPhones
I stand corrected.
“Working” is not what I would call that. The “Features” list is full of broken stuff and only 1 works and 1 partial.
Booting, yes. Working, not really.
If you mean interoperability there is https://libimobiledevice.org/ but honestly compared to what KDE Connect can offer with Android phones it’s just … lame.
doesn’t it have a unix like core like os x?
That’s bsd based.
Unlike Linux.
no, linux is a unix-like. macos is an actual unix.
Not quite. FreeBSD, where much of macOS originates after the merge from NeXTSTEP, is merely “UNIX-like” as well.
So is Inspur K/UX, which is a Linux distribution. There is a difference between Unix (the software) and UNIX (the certification).
oh?
Racing wheels lacks Linux support. It’s the biggest, actually only, reason why I’m dualbooting with Windows.
I’ve been trying to get my Thrustmaster TX to work on Linux Mint but no success so far. I’m still a little bit newbie with Linux so that might be the reason why my wheel doesn’t work (yet).
For debian / arch / fedora based distros: https://github.com/Kimplul/hid-tmff2
Looks like it’s not perfect however looks to be a good starting point.
Often the hotkeys on laptops for screen brightness, mute, etc will either not work or be wonky, on my HP Elitebook on Debian distros the brightness keys both mute the speakers instead, they work fine on Fedora though.
Internal HDMI capture cards are barely supported, there are some professional brands like blackmagic that have support but nearly all consumer grade capture cards are not supported at all, because the companies who make them don’t care about Linux.
USB based capture cards often work because they use the same standard protocols as USB cameras.
Anybody ever get Winmodems to work or did they all give up on it?
Back in the day, it was hard enough getting dialup internet working on Linux (especially before you had internet in your pocket, so you had to print out HowTos or write down a bunch of notes before you tried to do it).
But it was downright impossible with a class of modems that was designed essentially as a softmodem, heavily reliant on closed-source firmware and drivers, making them practically impossible to work on Linux.
Also my Ricoh SP211SU Laser printer is not supported, my workaround is using Windows via VirtualBox if I need to print anything.
About 10% of the hardware in my 2016 MacBook Pro. Twice I’ve tried to install Debian on that Satan spawn using various gists online, and each time I ended up deciding it wasn’t worth the time
Every other piece of hardware I’ve tried in the past works without fail, that MacBook irks me.
