Lossless WMA is an ancient exotic format so yeah, fair to push back. But Xbox controllers are the standard gaming controllers so there's no excuse. The rest of my complaints are Linux fuckery.
BTW my keyboard is also from Microsoft and someone did all the difficult things in the driver except one simple last step, which is like two extra lines of code. There are like ten forks of this driver on GitHub, each of them adding the same two lines.
The driving wheel is NOT Microsoft. The whole software stack had a critical bug that made the wheel unusable after a few minutes of gameplay. People worked on this for a long time. It finally got fixed, a few months after I joined the Linux party. BTW the Linux driver/userland tool implemented correctly LEDs on the wheel EXCEPT they were missing a parser of a file format that took me a day to manually implement and connect. It would take me at least a week though to make it a quality contribution. If I need to redo this for a new game, I'll publish my code.
I feel like there's a common theme that Linux usually almost works and for every functionality you need to spend a day fixing it because the developers did do all the difficult work, but then either botched UI, failed to implement non-core functionalities, or didn't test less common use cases. When my Fedora refused to update until I removed Wine, the official response was along "your program your problem".
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes with it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.