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Best way to work with USB devices that only have Windows software/drivers? (hilariouschaos.com)

submitted 1 month ago by NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have at least two devices I can’t use/update since ditching Windows and moving to Linux and macOS.

I have a water cooler on my Bazzite gaming PC that has an LCD. It was pretty cool because it displayed content on this screen like temps and cool graphics. I got the program running just fine using Proton and Wine, but it won’t properly discover the device in their proprietary software. The LCD screen is connected to one of my motherboard’s USB ports (not an actual USB port, but the one you plug front IOs into).

Same is true for a keyboard I have. It has a cool LCD for displaying gifs and this comes by software the keyboard uses. It can also update the firmware of the keyboard, when updates are available. I got the software running just fine on both Linux and macOS using Proton and Wine, but, same issue as before, the software once installed doesn’t find the USB keyboard.

Neither of these have software/drivers made or available for Linux or macOS.

I’ve played around with winecfg and device configurations in here and not found a way to get the devices to show up there.

Is there any way to get USB devices to work with software like this?

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just curious if you tried using WinPE for a lighter-weight approach.

[–] Australis13@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, didn't try that as I had several other applications as well that also won't run under WINE on Linux, so went with Windows VMs instead. But I'll have to give that a try when I have time.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You might also see if Winboat could work better. I haven't had a need for it, yet, but it sounds like a good solution for Windows-only software that doesn't work well with Wine

[–] Australis13@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

Thanks, will have to test that out too.