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Reverse engineering an unknown USB device means working out the protocol it uses to talk: the byte sequence that makes it do things. The good news is that most USB devices don’t encrypt their traffic. Everything they send and get back travels in plain sight on the USB bus, and Linux gives you the tools to watch it. Once you know the protocol, a Python script using pyusb can drive the device directly and skip the vendor software.

RISC-V laptops are making fast progress, but in 2026 they suit developers and hobbyists, not mainstream daily use. The hardware handles terminal work, web browsing, and code builds. The bottleneck is software. Many apps that x86 and ARM users take for granted, like Zoom, VS Code pre-built binaries, and most paid tools, don’t have native RISC-V builds yet. Whether that’s a deal-breaker depends on what you need the laptop to do.