Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle

I actually really appreciate USB devices that masquerade as a storage device to provide their own drivers. I suppose in this day and age the "right" thing to do is to upload a bunch of stuff to microsoft servers so that it downloads whatever is needed upon getting plugged in, but I've observed enough stuff needing manually installed drivers to know that this isn't as apparently easy as it may appear to be. (For example, I very often need to download vendor-specific ADB drivers)

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.

I appreciate them working out-of-the-box on Linux even more. And they mostly do, with Linux being the best PnP (Plug'n'Play — remember that with Windows 95? :) OS today.

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.

> with Linux being the best PnP

as long as it isn't wireless or bluetooth

Linux has out of the box support for the SBC-XQ hack, which is pretty much the highest quality, most widely supported (even by Apple hardware) low-latency-ish way to drive BT audio. Works exceptionally well. And switching profiles works better than under Windows.

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.