Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle

Anyways, I think it's clever for peripherals to help you bootstrap, and having the drivers baked into the device makes things a little easier instead of trying to find a canonical download source.

But multiple modes of operation really made it harder for to configure devices like those 4G/LTE USB dongles: they will either present as USB storage, or one type of serial device or a CDC-ACM modem device (or something of the sort), requiring a combination of the tools + vendor-specific AT commands to switch it into the right mode. Ugh, just get me back those simple devices that do the right thing OOB.

I remember it as Plug-n-Pray

I appreciate the ones that don't need their own drivers in the first places. Sure something needs special drivers but things like usb sticks and mice should just work using the default ones and let you get the updates from the internet if you want them.

as long as it isn't wireless or bluetooth

fwiw the last time I had wireless issues was with an exceedingly cheap 2013 laptop built from tablet hardware. That required an out of tree driver for a few years.

For a long while there was an issue with multiple monitors which you want to configure with different settings: you couldn't.

I believe that is also fixed today with Wayland but I mostly stick to a single monitor anyway.

And USB Ethernet, USB CDC-ECM/NCM has existed for a while and have drivers in common OSes. And yet we are plagued by USB Ethernet with custom drivers (some of which are not available for macOS on Apple Silicon).

Of course, PCIe over Thunderbolt is even better.

I have never encountered any problem whatsoever. Only in Windows I have encountered sometimes scaling problems.

The only programs with which I had sometimes problems in Linux with high-DPI monitors have been commercial applications written in Java, some of which were very expensive. However those problems were not Linux-specific, but Java-specific, because those Java programs behaved equally bad on Windows.

For some reason, there seems to exist a high percentage of Java programmers who are incompetent at writing GUIs and the programs written by them neither follow the platform DPI settings nor allow the user to select a suitable display font, making their programs unusable without a magnifying glass when using high-DPI monitors. Moreover, I have encountered several expensive Java applications that crash and die immediately when used with monitors configured for 10-bit color instead of 8-bit color, both on Linux and on Windows.

So in more than a decade of using only high-DPI displays, I have never had problems with native Linux GUI applications, I have seldom encountered problems with native Windows applications and I have very frequently encountered problems with Java applications, regardless of the operating system on which they were run.

All the USB network devices that I have ever used required specific drivers. Sometimes the drivers happened to be already bundled with the Linux kernel or with Windows, but frequently they were not.

There's multiple GUI Java toolkits and they all equally suck in their own way. Eclipse for example uses SWT which translates to the native application toolkit, which "should" support HiDPI, but as you're limited to native widgets it's not very common.

That should tell you that there are plenty of different USB Ethernet Adapters that you can find when buying one.

Among those that I have encountered more frequently have been several kinds of Realtek, and of ASIX, and of Aquantia.

Especially among the faster USB Ethernet adapters I doubt that there are many without custom drivers.

Some people may not notice this, if they are using only fat Linux kernels, with all the possible device drivers being enabled and compiled, but if you use a streamlined kernel, e.g. for instant booting, you may need to add a device driver whenever you buy such an Ethernet adapter.

Bluetooth works better under modern Linux than modern windows. I can go on for literal hours about this. Windows Bluetooth stack is the most broken and disgraceful pile of code I've ever had to work with.

It doesn't tell you that at all. Linux contains tons of drivers for odd devices that you will never encounter in your lifetime.

Note that kernel is totally unconcerned with DPI in general: it only cares about physical pixels and reports physical dimensions to apps — if scaling caused kernel level issues, it might be related to proprietary driver issue (they frequently lag in Nvidia's case).

I never used ultrawides myself, but if the monitor did not report proper "timings" and available resolutions, you might have needed some manual tweaks.