Hmmm…. I’ve got those exact fans and the controller that comes with them - 10 fans to be specific, and they really haven’t given me any trouble at all. There are three sets of 3 daisy chained, and one single fan. They connect to a relatively new asus board. I’m running arch and openrgb from the aur.
The fans doing fan things (spinning), that just works. They ramp up and down based on the case fan connector from the mobo. One three pack is on the radiator to an aio cooler and that triplet ramps up and down based on the fan speed header for the cpu.
The LIGHTS are a different story. If I cycle power completely, they do the default rainbow puke when started back up. OpenRGB required a little configuration and playing around to get the number of lights correct, and synching properly-but it worked. (I can get you my settings in openRGB if that helps avoid the trial and error). Because my mobo still supplies power when I power down, the lights hold their last pattern when I reboot.
So in my experience-those fans spin without any software and light up at least rainbow puke without any software. You only need software to get different colors or to just override the fan header and set a manual speed.
I’m wondering what your computer/mobo is doing to stop that. Weird.