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Best way to work with USB devices that only have Windows software/drivers? (hilariouschaos.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip
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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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[–] 3 points 11 months ago (4 children)

The only solution I have found for this (I have a digital microscope with Windows-only drivers) was to use a VM. In my case VirtualBox + Windows 10 worked. That's a lot of overhead for what you want to do, though.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 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.

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    • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    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.

    It feels like the USB HID device (your keyboard) is being unbound from either the operating system or from the HID profile when you get the software running. Its also possible that part of the nature of the vendor software actually decouples the keyboard HID profile and substitutes some vendor proprietary communication method which isn't USB HID.

    Prior to having the software running under Wine, does your keyboard show up with 'lsusb' ?

    After you have the software running under Wine, what shows up with 'lsusb'?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago

    This is a good point I never considered, thank you. I’m going to check into this and see when I get back later today.

    At first I had the keyboard connected directly to the computer but now I use a KVM. I’ll check when connected over KVM and directly and report back what lsusb shows.

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    • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Does the keyboard work?

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    • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Windows VM with USB passthrough is the way. I recommend KVM for spinning up VMs though I haven’t tried setting it up on bazzite before.

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