I like my 8bitdo controller but I have an older model so can’t speak for the more recent ones.

Mesa 25.0.0 Release Notes / 2025-02-19

[ 5067.696] (II) Applying OutputClass “AMDgpu” to /dev/dri/card1

Make sure that you actually have permission to that /dev/dri/card1 device. This may be arranged by udev or “video” group membership.

Regarding AMD vs Nvidia, unless you need CUDA you probably made the right choice. This sounds like a config issue and you’d probably be dealing with the same thing with Nvidia too.

To be fair the “no USB support” window was quite short. USB started becoming available to consumers around 1998-1999 and there was some level of USB support in the Linux kernel within a few months. I remember using an early USB stack written by someone else that Linus didn’t like so he rewrote it from scratch. Even the new Linus stack was in place by 1999. We got USB-2 and 3 support pretty quickly too.