My recent one had been DVB-S2 cards. But mainly because they weren't supported in mainline, the manufacturers drivers were turd and some folks had developed better open source drivers that I was using. Then one of the cards seemed to die so I fucked it off and bought a SAT>IP box (which I'm now running a custom firmware on
:$ )
Oh, and the fingerprint reader on my laptop. A year or two ago I couldn't get it to work at all. My current move to Mint relied on me getting that to work. I managed it, but I'm not totally sure what was the correct path. There was a lot of compiling and installing, a lot of which was probably not necessary, but I somehow hit the right combination and my fingerprints were being read successfully.
Thankfully the Linux community is pretty massive now, especially around debian based distros, so there's usually someone out there with your issue.
But sometimes you end up with a similar situation as this: