> PC component manufacturers offer Linux drivers for their hardware, sometimes it's binary blobs, etc. but at least there's some effort there.
I'm gonna say that it's a "generic" driver, which is totally fine on desktops but almost always (except for Thinkpads and Linux-focused laptop manufacturers) has a nasty edge case (modified chips or chip firmware) that just makes it incompatible. This isn't exclusive to Linux by the way, even Windows suffers from this exact problem (usually audio, fingerprint and touchpad).
I'm gonna say that it's a "generic" driver, which is totally fine on desktops but almost always (except for Thinkpads and Linux-focused laptop manufacturers) has a nasty edge case (modified chips or chip firmware) that just makes it incompatible. This isn't exclusive to Linux by the way, even Windows suffers from this exact problem (usually audio, fingerprint and touchpad).
Edit: for example, this is the FreeBSD code for HDA sound device (it's messy): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/dev/sou...