devcon
is covered by various facilties and commands in Linux.udev
. udev
is responsible for recognizing hardware changes, (possibly) autoloading modules, and creating nodes in /dev
if needed. If you wish to do something such as simulate a USB device removal under Linux (something that devcon
can do), commands that interact with the running udevd
should be used, I believe. I haven't done this under Linux but you can start by learning more about udev
.lsmod
will display all currently loaded kernel modules. Device drivers are one function of a kernel module. insmod
will load and start a module if possible, and most of the time cause the device to appear in /dev
. rmmod
does the reverse. If you execute an lsmod
you'll notice some modules are dependent on others, rmmod
won't let you remove a module if something depends on it. modprobe
with its options handles dependencies.initrd
) which is also loaded by the bootloader and immediately accessible to the kernel on boot. 'Installing' or 'updating' device drivers may involve creating a new or updated kernel with the module built-in, or adding/updating it in the initrd if it is not there. Most distributions provide tools and utilties to do this.lshw
can give you most of this information in a tree-like format. lspci
, lsusb
, lsscsi
, and lscpu
are also very helpful. Most busses such as PCI, SCSI, USB, have a lot of userland utilities available in most Linux distributions that you can use to configure and get information of specific classes of devices (example: hdparm
). And almost all mentioned in this paragraph, and more, are just frontends to various files and directories in /proc
and /sys
; you'll want to use the utilities though in most cases./sys
for the real device tree that lsusb/lspci are merely showing an abridged tabloid view of. Synology linux apps.hardinfo
which I already had installed but which you can install with:hardinfo
in the terminal or calling from Dash (Alt+F2) the gui appears like this:lspci
and lsusb
which are what I use most often but your question asks for a Windows 'device manager' equivalent.