Even with a universal driver, users still face hurdles that lead to the "long stories" found on tech forums today:

No discussion of universal USB joystick drivers is complete without mentioning the elephant in the room: .

Linux, via the (event device) interface, arguably comes closest to a native universal driver. The kernel’s HID layer automatically parses most USB joysticks into the /dev/input/js* namespace. If a joystick is non-standard, the community often writes a tiny quirk into the hid-quirks kernel module without needing a full new driver.