this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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That's capitalism for you. But also Linux, where it's typical to upstream hardware support and rely on existing ecosystems rather than release addon drivers or niche supporting apps.
China has made some strategic investments in Linux over the years though -- often domestically targeted, like Red Flag Linux, and drivers for chinese hardware, etc.
What do you mean lacking support for keyboards and controllers? Maybe for doing weird custom stuff like RGB, but for anything else they're standard HIDs and will work with anything, no "support" needed. You can plug a USB keyboard and mouse into your phone and it'll work if you want.
I'm currently playing Clair Obscur on linux through steam with a cheap fake xbox controller I got off ebay, and it works perfectly. I'm using an Nvidia card too, and I haven't had to do any customisation or anything.
Easy anti-cheat won't work, so Valorant/Fortnite, etc. are out of the question for now, but any games that don't use that kind of malware are probably fine.
Ah, makes sense. You're right about firmware updaters, and I don't know if I'd trust one running under Wine anyway tbh. Who knows what weird system calls they make assuming you're running Windows 95 or whatever.
There is plenty of consumer hardware that is supported on Linux, or will be as soon as a kernel developer gets their hands on it, reverse engineers the protocol if necessary, and adds support. For things like keyboards, there are often proprietary extensions (eg. for built-in displays, macros, etc.). It pays to check for Linux support before buying hardware though. Sometimes it's not the kernel drivers, but supporting software (eg. Steam input) that might not support it.
First class vendor support for Linux is more common for niche/premium hardware designed in the west, than cheap chinese knockoffs that follow it. Long term customer support is not their strong suit.
Still possible though, right?
It does afterall support out of tree device drivers now.
Sure... but why would el cheapo hardware want/need to support proprietary drivers? Now, for premium hardware and software, they might still want vendor lock-in mechanisms... So unless you absolutely have to, you should avoid hardware on Linux that needs proprietary drivers.
So either way, it make it better to support Linux over MS Windows.
Most of the handheld consoles they sell run Linux of some variety. It's just a question of what is marketable.
China has no need for open source because they steal everything anyway.
Great. Now they're building infrastructure and industry atop a stolen Trojan Horse, which may still bite them the moment the little oange man tells Nadella to flip the switch.
Likewise. Don't expect it from China though.