Several years ago i got an Altera "USB Blaster" programmer, which turned out to be not-genuine.
It worked great since then, on commercial, home-made and China-produced FPGA boards.
But there is a catch - it only does so under Windows.
I've recently moved my dev environment to Linux, and while Quartus and the rest works nicely, the programmer - not so much.
I tried every version of Quartus from 12 up, and in every one of them the programmer works intermittently in Active serial mode - it would erase the flash, but then fail at a random spot during the programming with a "Can't access JTAG chain" error.
The only difference between 12.0 and 15.1 is that in 12.0 it takes less than a second to restart, so i can spam it a few times to get it to work, while in 15.1 it takes 10-20 seconds to start and fail.
So, the question is - have anyone encountered any such problems, either with knock-off Altera programmers, with Linux, or with both at once?
Bonus question: As knock-offs go, how bad is this one?