My case: I have an nvidia GTX 980. It’s old but it’s what I have.

Nvidia dropped its support from driver version 595.

Driver 580 is what I need, it worked until 7.0 but no longer in 7.1 (was using Fedora 44). Since my hardware is old I switched to Debian Trixie.

Another example is the facetime HD Webcam of macbook pro: to make it work you have to install OSx or download a recovery image, compile a C program to extract a specific binary blob, then use that blob to recompile the driver on your kernel.

There are lots of examples: it’s a big world, with lots of hardware and mostly no producer interested in the Linux world.

Broadcom hardware (WiFi cards an webcams in particular). Plus there are quirks with some proprietary driver version not building against some kernel version…

With unsupported hardware and closed drivers you are always on the lookout for some breakage.

And it’s not a Linux problem nor a complaint on distro maintainers. It’s manufacturers that are shit.

It’s not, it’s a problem of every package manager that do not use sources and checksums, like rust and python. Take a look at this article that does a better job then me at explaining the situation.