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.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Not going to surprise anyone but Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets aren't great on Linux, at least with controllers
Although that is improving!
At least when I tried it 2 years ago, Meta Quest 2 PCVR wasn't really great on Linux either.
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.
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.
Fingerprint sensor on most laptops
And Elan touchpads if you are unlucky enough to own one.
This has been a real issue yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a broadcom firmware package you need to install? I have NEVER gotten away with neglecting that step on a broadcom card.
Some MediaTek WiFi cards are not supported. I had to replace one in a laptop.
Mediatek chips sucks anyway
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.
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.
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.
Certain less well known smaller brands might not work as too few people know the HW
Same goes for very specialized hardware, if it wasn't on Linux to begin with, it probably won't work
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