[HN Gopher] My mouse driver is asking for a firewall exemption (...
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My mouse driver is asking for a firewall exemption (2019)
Author : Tijdreiziger
Score : 903 points
Date : 2021-08-23 11:24 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I wish USB devices just came with read only storage that had the
| drivers
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| I wish most USB devices wouldn't need drivers at all, and just
| use standard interfaces. It's a mouse, we've been making them
| for half a century, why could it possibly need a custom
| protocol?
| queuebert wrote:
| I've never installed the drivers for my mice. They all point
| and quite often click.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| That is a good point, but that would limit things to the
| standards. Sure, things that are standard should use standard
| interfaces, and I bet this mouse works perfectly fine with
| the standard interface, but adds some extra functionality
| beyond that.
|
| Granted, it's absurd it needs internet access, I'm just
| saying that regardless of how well they are written, it would
| be nice if some drivers were available from the device
| itself.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| What functionality can a mouse have that couldn't have been
| standardized 20 years ago? I haven't encountered a mouse
| that had more than some sort of pointing device,
| scrollwheels, buttons and possibly some LEDs.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think someone mentioned this particular model needed
| the driver for customizing the LEDs.
|
| Off the top of my head, non standard features could be
|
| haptic feedback, vibrations, or purosely slowing the
| mouse down for interacting witha game
|
| palm print reader
|
| electric shock if the wrong person uses it
|
| locking mechanism for a secret compartment
|
| temperature sensor to let you know you might be sick
|
| fan to kick in to cool your hand off if its too hot
|
| persistence of vision display using the laser on the
| bottom
|
| That's all I got right now, but the point is if someone
| wants to do something weird they should be able to.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > What functionality can a mouse have that couldn't have
| been standardized 20 years ago?
|
| Apparently there are some wacky domain specific mice:
| https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-enterprise/
| ykonstant wrote:
| If I were designing the mouse, I would nickname the upstream
| servers "Rats' Nest".
| darkteflon wrote:
| The 3rd party mouse situation on Macs is totally out of control.
|
| I recently bought a Logitech G Pro X Superlight to use as my
| daily driver on an M1 Mac. The mouse, it's amazing. But
| Logitech's software is a fucking car crash. A casual perusal of
| Reddit and customer forums will confirm. Runs as root, Sensor DPI
| won't stay set, on-board mode flat out doesn't work, requires
| manually setting permissions on a config file in order to save
| settings (!), etc.
|
| After struggling with it for several days - including trying to
| set it up in on-board mode on a Windows PC before bringing it
| across - to no avail, I finally came across Steermouse
| (http://www.plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/index.html). Was then able
| to fine tune cursor and scroll wheel speed and acceleration,
| middle and back / forward button customisations, etc. Nuked
| Logitech's crap from orbit and never looked back.
|
| I've had similar experiences over the years with multiple
| Logitech mice on multiple Intel Macs - mostly using Logitech
| Options instead of GHub. You just can never get it quite right.
|
| So, PSA: if you're on a Mac (AS or Intel), own a Logitech mouse
| and fucking hate your life, try your luck with Logitech's
| software. Otherwise, get Steermouse.
|
| EDIT: Forgot to mention: if all you want is button customisation
| and you don't want to pay for Steermouse, Karabiner-Elements is
| free and will have you covered. You may already be using it
| anyway to, eg, remap your Caps key. It can't do cursor or scroll
| wheel adjustments, though.
| beltsazar wrote:
| Does Steermouse support per-app button mappings like Logitech
| Options and Karabiner?
| babypuncher wrote:
| It's pretty sad when libratbag for Linux is better than the
| official Logitech software for either Windows or Mac.
| Ballas wrote:
| Horrible software is why my Razer is in a box of unused wires.
| I am now sporting a Redragon that they have not even bothered
| to change the USB PID/VID, so it reports as a Pixart mouse
| (devkit?).
| [deleted]
| rcarmo wrote:
| I use a Logitech M720, which can be used on a Mac with zero
| extra software (although you can't use the fourth/fifth
| buttons, side scrolling works, response curve doesn't need any
| fancy tuning, etc.)
| CiceroCiceronis wrote:
| The situation's not all that much better on Windows, given that
| I put up with Logitech's shitty software crashing every time I
| unplugged a USB device for some months.
|
| Eventually just put the mouse into onboard profile mode,
| assigned all the buttons to F13-24, then mapped them with
| AutoHotkey. GHub, goodbye and good riddance.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Huh, interesting. I have an older Logitech G700s mouse, so it
| uses the older Logitech software. I never had any issue with it
| on a Mac. I only used it occasionally to adjust the onboard
| settings, and then forget about it for years on end.
|
| I now have a G703 (so new G Hub software) and while I haven't
| tried that on the Mac, I can configure the onboard settings
| from Windows or from Linux [0] with no issues whatsoever (aside
| from setting a button to show the battery level, which, for
| some reason, doesn't work).
|
| ---
|
| [0] The Logitech software doesn't work on Linux, but
| Piper/ratbag work just fine.
|
| https://github.com/libratbag/piper
| ratww wrote:
| _> The Logitech software doesn 't work on Linux_
|
| This is funny, considering it's an Electron app. They just
| didn't take the time to port, apparently.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I see this quite often and wonder what the reason is. Even
| for what seem like "basic" apps, as in not needing much
| interaction with the OS (say a note-taking app, as opposed
| to a video-conferencing app that presumable does more
| involved things, like GPU acceleration).
| mmis1000 wrote:
| It still requires you to build on each environments once
| to make the native dependencies work properly. Although I
| don't think it takes too much efforts to do that. But
| besides that, signing binaries on mac is complex and
| requires you to pay $100 to apple. For someone that don't
| use mac at first place, they probably don't even bother
| do it.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Is this build somewhat complex and / or not guaranteed to
| run well?
|
| I have absolutely no experience with Electron
| development, and actually believed that the cross-
| platform thing was free (or almost). Again, at least for
| apps that don't need special functions that could be
| platform dependent.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Technically it is free, until some native dependencies
| involve. Because you still need to setup build chains on
| each platform to make them compile. For example, vc on
| Windows, gcc on Linux, xcode on mac.
|
| Besides that, unlike java, nodejs don't bundle a lot of
| stdlibs by itself.(It don't even have a lib for
| manipulate images!) So you end up being required to use
| custom native modules for some specific tasks.(If no js
| alternative available)
|
| The nodejs way is build yourself, so you will have the
| right one. But since it is a bundled electron program, it
| doesn't work and you need to prebuild it.
| orwin wrote:
| Electron app are crashing every day when i'm doing
| something CPU intensive on my linux (i tend to have VSCode
| + Discord open, and pods in the background). 8 double-
| threaded core and 32G and this framework take one full CPU
| per app and crash when a deployment decide to take a
| fraction of the CPU computing power.
|
| I now open Discord exclusively with firefox.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Have you considered the flathub Discord repo? I have been
| using it for over a year with no hiccups.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Mine never crash on Gentoo. I have 32 GB of RAM though.
|
| I always have Discord, Element, VSCode (two windows), and
| two separate Chrome profiles running at the same time and
| I haven't seen it crash in weeks.
| judge2020 wrote:
| To be fair it seems the low-level parts, like interfacing
| with the mice via USB, would be harder to port to Linux and
| are unrelated to electron.
| passivate wrote:
| In the past when I ran into this issue it was trivial to
| reverse-engineer the vendor's mouse app and re-play whatever
| commands it was sending the USB driver/filter. If anyone has a
| G100s or a Razer DiamondBack 3G, I think I should have the
| commands saved somewhere and I'd be happy to dig them up.
|
| Since then, I've switched over to a driver-less mouse where
| everything is controlled via mouse buttons (XTRFY MZ1).
| [deleted]
| fossuser wrote:
| Is it a Mac thing? I've had issues with Logitech software even
| on Windows.
|
| Their mice hardware is pretty good, but the software is so bad
| I never install it and just use whatever works on the mouse by
| default.
|
| On Mac I use the magic trackpad for wireless because it's the
| only one I've found that consistently works with the bluetooth
| connection. I'm not sure who is at fault, but other bluetooth
| devices just constantly have issues (drop connection, fail to
| wake, fail to pair, etc.)
|
| For wired I sometimes use one of the Razer "Gaming" mice - I
| don't like the aesthetic, but there aren't a lot of great
| options in that category and they work well enough.
|
| Apple mice have never been good - they've always been form
| instead of good design.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I've had good luck with the MX Anywhere 3. It's worked pretty
| much painlessly over bluetooth with two iPads and two Macs.
| (And I didn't install any extra software.)
|
| https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/mice/mx-
| anywhere-3.9...
| fossuser wrote:
| Thanks - I've mostly used their Marathon mice in the past,
| but I'll check that one out.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I feel you man, I don't know how companies can make such good
| physical products and shit on them before selling with software
| of malware-esthetics w/prince-of-africa-wants-your-bank-
| account-info-to-help-with-his-fortune permissions, crashing as
| main functionality three-ring circus to provide checkbox and
| slider config.
| skoskie wrote:
| If you authored a book in which you just trashed a particular
| subject, I would read it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| So I am a membr of the trackballs subreddit. I run almost
| exclusively linux so I don't run into this issue, but two of
| the popular brands for trackballs are Logitech and Elecom.
| Elecom's software is far worse than Logitechs (also their
| firmware only vaguely respects the USB HID spec, so none of the
| extra buttons work with a generic HID driver).
|
| There are dozens of threads asking about how to use logitech
| and elecom trackballs on Macs and they all end up with "Well, I
| finally got steermouse and all my problems have gone away"
| progbits wrote:
| Funny how the manufacturer does such a bad job there is money
| to be made in shipping an actually functioning driver...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Elecom doesn't even try with their firmware. They send an
| identical HID descriptor regardless of what the device
| actually supports (x +y scrollwheel, 5 other buttons).
| Here's the linux workaround:
|
| https://code.woboq.org/linux/linux/drivers/hid/hid-
| elecom.c....
|
| If you use a recent Elecom device and an LTS linux kernel
| you need to patch your kernel just to get the buttons
| working right!
| rchaud wrote:
| Using a Logitech M185 barebones wireless KB + Mouse with no
| issues on a Mac. Plug and play.
|
| 2021 would be the first time I've even heard about headphones
| needing the vendor's app to work right, or input peripherals
| needing to install its own drivers like its 1998.
| toss1 wrote:
| Not dissimilar w/Windows, although maybe not as bad - the 1st
| thing that came up just now in a search for my device was a
| Logitech Support page about "If you are having trouble with
| Mac..."
|
| I use a M-R0056 MX Ergo trackball, primarily for CAD. It's
| fantastic hardware, very precise & responsive, controllable,
| and reliable even after years of being packed into/out of a
| laptop bag almost daily, etc.
|
| But the drivers? Ugghh. After looking at all the great function
| mappings and other stuff they could supposedly do, I did a
| whole bunch of setup, and found that the software was, to be
| very polite, flaky.
|
| Tried multiple fixes, but in the end, just de-installed and ran
| the hardware with the default Windows mouse software ever
| since. The Logitec software is just a complete waste of time.
|
| I haven't been in windows internals since Win32, so I have no
| idea if it is MS making it impossible to make good drivers, or
| it's lazy 3rd parties shipping second rate stuff. To me it
| feels like it's 2nd rate managed as bloatware - just use the
| biggest and quickest libraries available and ship it, but that
| is complete conjecture. Either way, it is really disappointing
| to get such good hardware and not be able to take advantage. If
| anyone has any insight as to why it's so bad, or what can be
| done about it...? E.g., is there a similar obscure utility like
| Steermouse for Windows (looks great, but seems Mac-only)?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I used Logitech mouse on a Mac few years ago. I used Windows PC
| to configure it and it remembered all stuff inside. I did not
| install anything on Mac, it just worked. It's a pity to hear
| that they broke it.
|
| I used Asus mouse. It was truly underwhelming, even on Windows.
| It did not remember its settings, instead some "driver"
| software applied those settings on Windows startup, which
| caused mouse device to disappear for a few seconds every time I
| booted my computer with annoying plug-out, plug-in sounds.
| shocks wrote:
| Here on Linux, it (the Superlight) just works.
|
| There's libratbag[0] if you want to mess with some DPI
| settings.
|
| 0: https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag
| danudey wrote:
| I had a Logitech G930 headset and a Logitech G-series keyboard
| and mouse. Worked great. Then one day it updated (in the
| background).
|
| Without the software running, the extra programmable buttons on
| my mouse (which I used a _lot_ ) wouldn't work, which is
| normal.
|
| With the software running, my G930 headset would now reconnect
| over and over for ten minutes whenever I plugged it in or
| turned it on, making it almost useless.
|
| It eventually resolved itself, but I don't know when because I
| didn't use it for a few years. Ugh.
| stopnamingnuts wrote:
| > Nuked Logitech's crap from orbit
|
| +1. It's the only way to be sure.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Just as a counterpoint, I have G703, which I daily use on macOS
| and Windows, and hadn't had any issues with it or the G Hub.
|
| However, I'd prefer native, non-Electron app, that doesn't take
| 350 MB of space, just to configure my mouse (G Hub).
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Wait what, G Hub is a Electron app?! Well, that explains why
| the software felt odd/off compares to Logitech Gaming
| Software.
|
| I have G600, the software works in my MBA M1 but it couldn't
| pick up my mice. Because G600 is connected through the mini
| dock station dongle.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Those days every software rewrite is Electron. It's a
| plague.
| azalemeth wrote:
| 453 MB on my install. It's such a useless app that I used it
| once, configured everything, and then verified that the same
| mouse worked fine with libratbag on linux -- it does (I have
| it on a KVM box between two different machines). Next time
| I'll just configure it on linux. Their hardware is good --
| but the software is _awful_.
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| I think i'll stick with my cheap-o gaming mice that all run
| plug-and-play.
|
| almost 100% of the big-name companies that sell performance
| mice have this wierd thing where they force you to download and
| install bloatware just to have your mouse work properly.
|
| Had that problem years ago with my MadCatz R.A.T.. When MadCatz
| went out of business, my mouse turned into a paperweight.
|
| Currently using an A-JAZZ AJ52 (about $10 on amazon). Been
| using it for over a year now and it works perfectly for work
| and gaming. Drivers are plug-and-play, so no bloatware
| installed along with it. It really is nice.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I manage a ClickOnce application and every now and then a call
| will get escalated to me because it has suddenly become
| untrusted by the operating system. The root cause is the
| software for the MX Master helpfully sets some reg keys to
| distrust all ClickOnce applications every time it updates.
| Customers have been complaining it on their customer service
| forums for years about it.
| torstenvl wrote:
| I wouldn't normally chime in with a "me, too!" but it's worth
| reiterating that Steermouse is a godsend for mice on Mac.
| Whether it's sensitivity and acceleration or setting up extra
| buttons (and chording buttons!) it works splendidly and I don't
| know what I'd do without it. Using it with a Logitech MX
| Anywhere 2 myself.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I'll echo everything he said about Steermouse, except to
| substitute for Razer's bananas mouse software, not
| Logitech's.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I don't think Razer even has Mac drivers anymore, they went
| Windows only with Synapse 3. And with Apple's recent and
| repeated breakage of backwards compatibility, I doubt
| Synapse 2 runs anymore. It would have used used a kernel
| extension instead of DriverKit.
|
| Just as well, since Synapse is terrible.
| skoskie wrote:
| You ever been in a car with a driver's seat that has way too
| many options, so you can never really get the right position?
| That's why I've never tried Steermouse. I'm afraid I'll spend
| all my time trying to get all the settings right and
| constantly be frustrated.
|
| But after this thread, maybe I just just try it.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Skip straight to the Cursor tab and set acceleration to .8
| and sensitivity to 1775. Tweak from there only if you feel
| it's necessary.
| oauea wrote:
| Is this an ad for paid-for mac software? Sure looks like it...
| matsemann wrote:
| Kinda normal to have to pay for software to get basic
| functionality working on Mac, though. Like BetterTouchTools.
| dang wrote:
| You can't break the site guidelines like this. You broke them
| with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28233078, and
| you've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments and
| flamebait. This is the sort of thing we ban accounts for, so
| if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, we'd
| appreciate it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| smolyeet wrote:
| Not everything has malicious content , stop pushing this
| narrative
| moolcool wrote:
| Macs are just missing a lot of extremely basic mouse
| features. In typical Apple fashion, using it "the right way"
| is dead easy, but anything different is impossible without
| third party tools.
| oauea wrote:
| Looks like this software does not comply with EU regulations
| about refunds.
|
| > The registration information is not refundable because it is
| a short string and easy to copy. We cannot accept any refund
| requests for it. Please try this software before purchasing a
| license. You do not have to pay unless you are completely
| satisfied with this software.
| zinekeller wrote:
| 1) There is a trial period which allows to evaluate the
| software for its fitness. The software is time-limited
| instead of function-limited, which means that it'll be in the
| consumer's fault if they bought the software and found out
| that it didn't work (except for very limited problems, for
| example relating to said registration step).
|
| 2) EU regulations do have a nuance - and in this case, 1)
| makes determination if said software _needs_ to have a refund
| policy for the consumer harder. While WinRAR does have a
| refund policy, it seems the period for refunds is shorter
| than what is mandated. win.rar GmbH is based in Germany, so
| how it did bypass these rules? Spoiler: they didn 't, the
| rules allowed them precisely due to the evaluation period.
| lixtra wrote:
| For some goods the customer can be asked to agree to a no-
| refund.
|
| This is happening here.
|
| For Germany, see https://www.it-recht-kanzlei.de/digitale-
| inhalte-widerruf.ht...
| OGWhales wrote:
| > But Logitech's software is a fucking car crash
|
| The old software worked well. I was super disappointed when I
| got a superlight that it simply didn't work with old software.
| I'm on windows but describing the new software as a car crash
| is still extremely accurate.
|
| Anyone know of software similar to steermouse on windows?
| howolduis wrote:
| I use an Logitech MX Master 3 mouse on M1 and can't say I had
| much issues with it. That being said, Logitech has zero support
| for Linux. A +$100 mouse will turn into a cheap $5 mouse when
| you connect it to a Linux device, which is very frustrating
| since I would like to use my mouse across all my machines...
| wadim wrote:
| I use solaar[0] on Linux for my MX Master 2S; it's really
| nice and mostly works out of the box!
|
| [0] https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Solaar is in the default repositories of Ubuntu, and it
| does everything the Logitech Unifying Software does, but
| unbloated.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| It's a total mess.
|
| What keeps me sane is I bought two G203's, configured them on
| my PC, saved the settings to the mouse itself, then used them
| on my work and home Macs. Note this isn't required, but mice
| often come configured with relatively low DPI or annoying
| button assignments.
| maccard wrote:
| To be fair, it's garbage on windows too. The best solution I've
| come up with is a VM to configure the on-board settings and
| then run without the software normally
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Thankfully most of the better mice keep their settings
| (including macros) in hardware. So you can save all the
| profiles, settings, macros, button customization, etc, to the
| mouse, and then take that mouse to any computer and it'll
| work fine.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Which mice do? Is there a list somewhere? I just got a
| Steelseries mouse and the programmability only works if the
| driver is running in the background. I might as well just
| use Autohotkey. My previous A4Tech mouse was actually
| programmable.
| maccard wrote:
| My last Razer mouse did, as do both my Logitech mice.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Thanks. Can the macros have loops and conditionals? E.g.
| keep sending left clicks every 0.01 seconds until I press
| the left mouse key.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I have a Logitech g305 and it definitely doesn't run at the
| full polling rate without the stupid G Hub software running.
| It's noticeably smoother once I launch G Hub. Does anyone
| know if 1000hz polling doesn't work with the standard HID
| drivers on Windows or something?
| OGWhales wrote:
| My experience was that the dpi and everything else would
| reset itself after reboots and I'd have to launch the
| software for everything to work again, even if I set on-
| board memory on. Super annoying and may be the same thing
| causing your problem.
|
| I believe the g305 works with the old logitech software,
| which is much better than ghub. You should give that a try
| and see if it solves your issues with having to launch ghub
| just to get your mouse to work properly. Here is a link:
| https://support.logi.com/hc/en-ca/articles/360025298053
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The g305 does work with the previous software, but my
| Logitech steering wheel does not :( So I'm stuck with the
| new and terrible G Hub. Hopefully I can ditch the
| Logitech ecosystem whenever I get around to upgrading to
| a Fanatec wheel.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > The 3rd party mouse situation on Macs is totally out of
| control.
|
| Agreed. I have a 3Dconnexion CadMouse Pro Wireless, which is
| the only mouse I could find with [an actual middle mouse button
| in addition to a clickable scroll wheel]. After upgrading to
| Big Sur, physically clicking any mouse button doesn't register
| click events with the operating system. So I can move the
| cursor but not click it. The recommended workaround is to plug
| it in with the USB cable and use it that way.
|
| Is it 3Dconnexion's or Apple's fault? No idea, but this is just
| insane. When was the last time an OS upgrade caused your
| _mouse_ to stop working!? It's like taking a time warp back to
| the 90s.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I've got a Roccat Kone Aimo Remastered (ROC-11-820-BK, P/N
| GM1820-02-A01). It's got a wheel (with tilt), 2 clickable
| middle buttons, front/back, and a a sort of "shift" key for
| the mouse (hold it and any button can be mapped to an
| alternate function). Pretty comfortable (to me), and the
| driver can save all the settings to hardware in the mouse, so
| you theoretically don't need to keep the driver installed
| after you initially set the mouse up.
| tgv wrote:
| I know. I have a Logitech mouse too. Nothing wrong with the
| hardware. The software sort of works on my own MBP, even though
| it regularly crashes or forgets its functionality, but refuses
| to run on the work MBP, which runs the same OS and is otherwise
| nearly identical. No messages.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I have an M720, which requires Logi Options for smooth
| scrolling on macOS (also M1). It's monstrously large and has a
| weird UI, but besides that and it wanting full access to my key
| strokes ... it's okay. Stays out of the way, I haven't thought
| about it much at all.
|
| That said I do have some weird issues with my mac and _haven 't
| rules it out as a cause_.
| moolcool wrote:
| The mouse situation generally in the mac ecosystem is hot
| garbage. You need a third party tool to disable cursor
| acceleration and scroll wheel acceleration (both of which are
| major quality-of-life features). You also can't map pressing
| the scroll wheel to a click-and-drag scroll.
| zabatuvajdka wrote:
| Is there a reason why? Does OSX lock down the driver
| subsystem or something?
|
| Personally I don't have a fancy mouse (just a cheap wired
| Microsoft one) because it's hard to find good ambidextrous
| mice. So it probably just uses standard mouse drivers.
| another_kel wrote:
| I think the reason is that consumers of expersive &
| customizable mice are gamers who almost exclusively use
| windows.
|
| Razer used to have a mac version of their app but they just
| decided to not make their new app and support any new
| devices several years ago.
| zabatuvajdka wrote:
| Ah--yeah that makes sense. I would like to foray into
| better hardware territory at some point. There certainly
| could be a lot of value for all applications with quick
| mouse-triggered macros and whatnot.
|
| I typically swap my mouse hand to prevent repeating
| stress injuries so there'd have to be better ambidextrous
| support!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I have a Logitech G305, which I love. I configured the buttons
| inside of a VM, threw away the VM, and I never intend to touch
| the software again. (Unless I get a new mouse.)
| varenc wrote:
| Highly recommend Steermouse to all Mac users with a Logitech
| mouse. The Logitech software is horrible. Constantly consumes
| background resources for no reason. I've only need to use it a
| few times to turn a mouse's color LEDs off.
| dylan604 wrote:
| From steermouse front page: "Includes some options, "Double
| Click", "Click Lock" and so on. A letter key is available for
| these clicks. For example, a space key + click allows you to
| grab-scroll in Photoshop."
|
| Isn't this the default behavior of Photoshop? I've been using
| space+drag since moses was a baby. How is this a feature of
| this software?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I use the Logitech M510 on my Mac, and love it. Bought it in
| 2012 or 2013. The form factor of the Mac mouse is just a deal-
| breaker for me. Its beautiful, but makes my hand hurt.
|
| I never installed drivers for the mouse. Its just a mouse; I
| shouldn't need them.
|
| I recently bought their updated version of that mouse for our
| Windows machine, and tested it on my iMac; no drivers required.
| Maybe there are fancier mice that require special software, but
| I hardly use the fancier scroll functions of the mouse I have,
| so I have a hard time believing there'd be other controls that
| I'd be willing to install new software for.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I came here to post the same thing. I've been using Logitech
| mice for something like 20 years on my Mac and have never
| once installed a driver. I recently learned the some Wacom
| tablets drivers request network access. WTF? There's no legit
| reason for a driver to need network access. There could be a
| separate program that checks for updates and prompts the user
| to install them if desired. It shouldn't be part of the
| driver, though.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Wacom drivers are known to be problematic.
|
| _Wacom tablets track every app you open_ , last year:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247292
| robohoe wrote:
| I agree - it's a simple mouse and it works well on Windows
| and Mac without any additional drivers. If I needed more, I'd
| just get an Apple trackpad.
| silisili wrote:
| I've been using Linux for 2 decades now, and cannot remember
| a time a mouse didn't just work. Mostly Logitech, from PS2 to
| USB to wireless.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Huh, my wireless mouse does all kinds of weird stuff. The
| oddest is that sometimes Linux decides that two mice are
| attached despite there being only one USB dongle plugged
| in, and the only solution is to turn off the mouse, unplug
| the wireless receiver dongle, plug it back in, and hope it
| worked. Otherwise it's either reboot or rmmod/modprobe.
|
| Of course, the mouse is a Razer...
| fanick wrote:
| Can confirm. Have been using wireless Logitech MX master
| 3. There is like 1 in 10 chance that my Linux machine
| hangs when putting it into sleep and I touch the mouse.
| Also it is almost guaranteed the machine freezes when i
| turn the mouse off with the switch on its belly while
| putting the computer to sleep. It taught me to always
| save my work at least:)
| jamessb wrote:
| Interesting - I also have a wireless logitech mouse
| connected to a ubuntu machine that intermittently crashes
| when going to sleep. It hadn't occurred to me that the
| crashes might be linked to the mouse.
| zsmi wrote:
| It depends. I'm always on the lookout for a better mouse
| for use in CAD on Linux. I've mostly settled on the
| Logitech Anywhere 2S, because it does "just work", but this
| is hardly a universal opinion. At least within my
| workplace.
|
| I've found basically all mice will work if all you want is
| scroll and left, center, right buttons. But if you want all
| the extra stuff, like the various wheels and side buttons
| etc., and especially if you want to customize the response,
| which CAD people often do, then one often needs the driver.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Out of curiosty, which CAD software do you use on Linux?
| While I don't use CAD very often, all the software my
| engineer friends swear by only runs on Windows so any
| Linux recommendations would be appreciated.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Yeah, my CAD software, Rhino, is all that ties me to
| Windows.
| programmer_dude wrote:
| FreeCAD?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Not OP, but I finally switched away from Fusion 360 to
| FreeCAD - https://www.freecadweb.org/
|
| I'll be honest, Fusion 360 is still a lot better in a lot
| of ways (advanced feature set, ease of use, layout and
| hotkeys, etc), and if I were employed to do CAD full
| time, I'd still be using it (helps that the company would
| be buying the license).
|
| FreeCAD is workable, though. And since I'm mostly just
| making parts to 3d print, it gets the job done nicely.
|
| TinkerCAD is another option (https://www.tinkercad.com/)
| and it's honestly the _easiest_ CAD tool I 've ever used.
| But it's not really comparable to the real parametric CAD
| tools.
| zsmi wrote:
| I'm an EE so most of my work, that requires a lot of
| mousing, is layout which involves various
| Cadence/MentorGraphics tools. I think most of the
| mechanical engineers here use NX. It's industrial grade,
| very expensive, and not open-source, etc. The mechanical
| engineers used to use windows too and moved off it a
| couple of years ago. No idea why.
| dheera wrote:
| On Linux I just use xbindkeys to get the extra buttons to
| do something. The extra mouse buttons work out of the box
| with X with no drivers, they just need to be assigned to
| do something.
|
| I have 2 extra mouse buttons for switching between
| virtual workspaces and another 2 for volume control.
|
| https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/config/conf
| ig-...
|
| https://github.com/dheera/scripts/blob/master/config/file
| s/x...
| silisili wrote:
| Gotcha... that makes sense. I've never required more than
| two buttons and a scroll wheel, which I guess explains
| that.
| megameter wrote:
| Lately I have returned to using a gamepad with Joy2Key
| for browsing and productivity in Windows, something I
| last did in the 2000's. It's not perfect(some mouse
| events just don't work right through this method so I may
| have to try other software) but it's reminded me of what
| gamepads are good at relative to mice, which is - _almost
| everything except whipping around the cursor, which isn
| 't useful in productivity apps anyway._ Precision and
| speed can be had by using multiple sticks and dpad, you
| can hold it at many angles and aren't chained to the
| desk, the grips have been ergonomically refined, and
| there's a decent selection of sticks, buttons and
| triggers. I wish gamepads had some wheels or dials too,
| but the options already there are aplenty and I am
| testing a few out right now.
|
| I currently mix gamepad with a split keyboard(Freestyle
| 2) and a Kensington trackball as the backup mouse; having
| the controller in the center of the split makes it smooth
| to pick up and put down. And if I really needed more
| dedicated controls - well, why stop at one gamepad? Maybe
| I should try a flight stick too.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I've felt the same way, even on a Mac, but I don't really
| care about how my mouse "feels" compared to some people.
| Does the cursor move? Good enough for me.
|
| That said, I'm all in on trackpads 24/7 now and have been
| for years. Nobody does trackpads better than Apple and
| using a giant external one while my laptop is docked helps
| me to remain productive when I need to undock. So much of
| your productivity is muscle memory and by using a trackpad
| full time, I'm also flexing those muscles.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I agree that Apple's track pad is the best out there. I
| find something are just not done well on track pads
| though. Certain games, certainly. Also things that
| require long click and drags.
| pdpi wrote:
| > Certain games, certainly.
|
| An acquaintance mentioned that her daughter damaged the
| trackpad on her MacBook. She was making do with a regular
| mouse, but apparently hated it horrendously for Minecraft
| and desperately wanted to get the trackpad fixed. I can't
| even wrap my head around the idea of Minecraft on a
| trackpad.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I've been using the Logitech G502. While the mouse does
| work using standard USB drivers all the extra features
| require an open source program to manipulate.
| clomond wrote:
| External mouse - agreed.
|
| Trackpad support though has had many issues over the years
| in my experience across devices & distros.
| khedoros1 wrote:
| I've used Linux over a similar time period. I remember
| plenty of times when the scrollwheel wasn't mapped to
| anything, and I needed to stick a value for ZAxisMapping
| into the X configuration. At this point, it's been a number
| of years since I needed to do that manually, but it used to
| be a pretty regular thing for me.
| duxup wrote:
| Do you HAVE to install third party software to make your mouse
| work on a Mac?
|
| I tend to just ... never install any software like that on my
| Windows PC.
| Milner08 wrote:
| No, you dont. They work fine (at least my MX Master does)
| without, however you may loose some features like back and
| forward. Plus you need the software to customize settings
| like what button does what.
| snazz wrote:
| The HID drivers that come with your operating system work
| fine, but you'll be missing out on any manufacturer-specific
| customization features (nonstandard buttons, remapping, DPI
| settings, lights, etc).
|
| I also don't tend to install software like that (including
| the GUIs for graphics drivers too--just install the driver
| through Device Manager) and I don't care about the lost
| functionality. But if you want your fancy gaming mouse to
| have most of the special features it was advertised to have,
| the software is useful.
| handrous wrote:
| Nah. I'm on a Logitech 720 (bluetooth, wireless, many
| buttons) and didn't even know there _was_ anything that I
| could download for it for Mac. It just works.
|
| ... but I don 't care about customizing button behavior or
| anything like that, and only have a mouse this fancy because
| I wanted to 3-device switching on it (so I could easily use
| it on Windows and iOS, too). Though now that I've got one I'm
| kinda in love with the free-spinning scroll wheel and would
| have trouble going back to a normal one (though I _hated_ it
| at first).
| willyt wrote:
| If you have a mouse with more than left, right, middle
| buttons and scroll wheel, it needs a 'driver'[0] of some kind
| so you can configure what the extra buttons do. Otherwise you
| can ignore the extra buttons and just use it like a normal
| mouse.
|
| [0] I don't think it's an actual driver, I think it just
| remaps USB HID events from the built-in driver.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Logitech/Razer/Corsair, all trash software. Thankfully I was
| able to work around having to use Razer with some open source
| software but I'm still stuck with Logitech (Logitech G Hub) for
| my camera and Corsair (iCue) for my headset. /Every/ /single/
| /time/ I join a Zoom/video chat I have to open G Hub to fix the
| zoom level (set it back to 100%, it's stuck zoomed in ~120%).
| It's incredibly infuriating to join every meeting zoomed in,
| have my video freeze for 1-5 seconds when I open the camera
| settings in G Hub, then have my image pop to the right size
| (note: I don't have to click anything, just open the camera
| settings to fix it). Also I have to close (red button in top
| right of the G Hub window, not full quit) the G Hub window in
| between meetings (If I leave it up and just back out of the
| camera settings it won't fix the camera when I click back into
| the camera). Also sometimes G Hub just doesn't open and it's
| got 2-4 (lghub, lghub_updater, lghub_agent, lghub Helper)
| processes that you have to kill in quick succession to really
| kill the software (or they will restart each other) before you
| can restart it and try again. It also appears to need an update
| once a week or so which is fun to find out when you open it to
| fix the zoom level and have to wait until it finishes updating
| and relaunching.
|
| Razer was a huge PITA constantly forgetting my config and I
| couldn't be happier now that I have Karabiner handling
| everything for my Razer device.
|
| Corsair makes a great wireless headset that plays nice with Mac
| and has good range (I can walk around almost all of my house
| and stay connected which is a godsend for Zoom hangouts with
| friends). Unfortunately, their software, iCue, is trash. It
| regularly tells me my headset is "Unavailable" when it's
| working just fine and if I leave my headset off the charger
| (aka, I don't plug in it) and it goes to sleep then it's a
| 50-50 chance that it will forget it's config. I couldn't care
| less about the RGB nonsense on the ear cups but the bright LED
| on the mic boom (green = on, red = off) is distracting.
| Thankfully they have a setting to only show the LED when the
| mic is off (exactly what I want, I want visual confirmation I'm
| muted). The problem is if it loses it's config that defaults
| back to always on and I have to do a dance of killing the iCue
| software and relaunching it until it fixes itself.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| > I don't have to click anything, just open the camera
| settings to fix it
|
| Fyi I frequently have to open zoom camera settings to make my
| laptop camera (Linux, darter pro) work. The fault may your
| case be shared with zoom, which is also a dumpster fire.
| joshstrange wrote:
| That's very fair, I feel like I've tried nuking Zoom from
| orbit to fix this and it didn't help but there is a chance
| I've missed something. Thanks for sharing your experience,
| I'd love nothing more than to be wrong and find a way to
| fix this in Zoom!
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Sadly I can't help with a fix. I just open the zoom
| settings and if that fails try restarting random stuff
| and if that fails reboot my computer.
| wobblykiwi wrote:
| iCue is the worst software I've had the pleasure of working
| with. For months I was trying to debug lag spikes in games I
| was playing, turning off services, closing every application,
| using different wireless adapters, even connecting through
| ethernet was giving me lag spikes. Finally traced it down to
| iCue doing something in the background where it would
| pause/block all outbound traffic except for itself for a
| couple hundred ms every 10 or so seconds. God that was
| infuriating.
| larrik wrote:
| I tried 3 different mice on macOS and finally just bought a
| Magic Touchpad. I never understood why Mac folks were obsessed
| with keyboard shortcuts, but now I know. Mouse on Mac
| completely sucks and it's embarrassing.
|
| I have a Mac machine and a Linux machine side by side and my
| efficiency on Linux is like double that of on Mac, even though
| I use the Mac 90% of the time.
|
| (Mac destroys everything else on 4k scaling, though. Linux is
| atrocious at that. Windows is just "good enough.")
| selykg wrote:
| > I never understood why Mac folks were obsessed with
| keyboard shortcuts, but now I know.
|
| No. Most Mac users are obsessed with keyboard shortcuts
| because they're faster and more efficient. This is true
| whether a mouse experience was super optimized or not. If
| you're typing moving to a mouse takes a lot more time than
| using a keyboard shortcut. Similarly being a left-hand
| shortcut wizard is highly effective when combined with a
| mouse as well.
|
| Lets not use stupid hyperbole here.
|
| I think 99% of Mac users could plug a mouse in out of the box
| and use it just fine on a Mac. Those that need the extra
| support can just as easily install one of the many 3rd party
| utilities that better handle mice support than the
| manufacturer.
| larrik wrote:
| I disagree here. I use keyboard shortcuts on both
| platforms, but I can be fast either way on Linux, while on
| Mac I just can't get used to the acceleration curves and
| other odd behaviors that simply don't happen on the other
| platforms with the same mice.
|
| I tried Microsoft, Logitec, and SteelSeries, which is about
| as great a variety of mice as can be expected.
|
| I know I tend to be in the minority on HN in my dislike of
| macOS, but I'm trying here.
|
| Conversely, I really really like the magic keyboard, and
| having an extra accelerator button is pretty nice (that
| isn't the stupid MS button).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The fact that mouse acceleration curves are such a common
| irritant is a bit mystifying to me. I jump between macOS
| and Windows frequently and occasionally dabble with
| Linux, and any differences in "cursor feel" disappear
| within ~30s of usage, after which I can't tell that
| there's differences in the curve at all unless I'm
| specifically looking for it.
| handrous wrote:
| Ditto, it's something I rarely notice and that never
| bothers me. I game on Windows, use Linux desktops
| occasionally, and work on macOS mostly. Former mainly-
| Linux user, too. Whatever the defaults are for Mac
| cursors don't bother me a bit. In fact the only system
| customization I really do with a new Mac is to install
| Spectacle, and then use its defaults without configuring
| it further. That's about it. Oh, and set caps lock to an
| extra ctrl, which you can do through the normal Mac
| settings panel with a few clicks. Otherwise, I don't even
| know what I'd _want_ to customize, behavior-wise.
| selykg wrote:
| Have you tried using tools like Steermouse? It has been
| awhile since I've used it but as I recall it allows
| controlling a lot more of the mouse behavior than the
| system does in System Preferences.
| larrik wrote:
| I have used a few tools, but most of the ones that worked
| for me in the past died in the last few major versions of
| OSX. I don't believe Steermouse was one of them, though.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Exactly, I don't care if the mouse is "tuned", I just care
| that the cursor moves at a reasonable tracking speed.
|
| That said, I'm full time trackpad, even on desktop, so
| mouse stuff is rarely an issue for me. I'm only using a
| mouse in specific scenarios.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Not the same ammount of crap but 3DConnexion drivers play in
| the same league. Huge (150M+) driver, on M1 Mac it is only in
| beta mode for almost a year, it forgets its 'smart' scroll
| behaviour - that is dumb like a brick - at every switch off,
| but without the driver there is no click! I am serious, the
| driver is mandatory to use the primary button. Without it only
| the mouse pointer and the scroll wheel works. It is just a
| mouse, although a real 3 button one, only one out there as far
| as I know. It does not require firewall exception at least.
| ajh13 wrote:
| I recently got a Xtrfy M42 mouse and it requires no additional
| downloadable software. Everything you need to change the DPI
| and RGB are physical buttons. Which was one of the main reason
| I chose it over other comparable mice.
| gruez wrote:
| [deleted]
| addingnumbers wrote:
| The answer is in the sentence immediately before where you
| started copying
|
| > ... and then it downloads the drivers/updates off of
| media.roccat. org using HTTP.
| ekimekim wrote:
| The driver itself is HTTP, not HTTPS. They were saying they
| hoped that the HTTPS call which tells it _where_ to download
| the driver also contained signatures so that the later HTTP
| request could be verified. spoilers: it does not. So you don 't
| need to mitm the HTTPS request, you just wait until they make
| the follow-up HTTP request, mitm that and serve whatever you
| want.
| [deleted]
| sschueller wrote:
| I can't find it online because of all the current mouse freezing
| issues but I recall that the very old macs (late 80s) would
| freeze on mouse down until you let go of the button.
| dstick wrote:
| Looks like he had a lot of fun getting to the bottom of it :)
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1146136251449278466
| faho wrote:
| (The bio lists pronouns - _they_ had a lot of fun)
| 2ion wrote:
| This is a problem with all proprietary software. For example,
| it's impossible to install most "bought" Windows software outside
| of dedicated VMs for me and stay happy because (a) most
| "enterprise" installers still want to run under elevated
| privileges (hell no), (b) as soon as elevated privileges are
| granted basically rape the registry and file system all over the
| place, touching everywhere they shouldn't and (c) cannot be
| contained because of this except on the OS level, hence multiple
| VMs and finally (d) cannot really be uninstalled without
| reinstalling the entire OS as the uninstallers (again, having
| privileges to delete everything) themselves cannot undo what the
| installers did.
|
| I have not installed a lot of software on Windows, macOS and
| Linux in my "main" OS instance because it simply looked and/or
| behaved shady as fuck.
| jsilence wrote:
| I remember the times when you would load the mouse driver into
| the memory above 640k of your 1Mb RAM PC. It was around 30kb in
| size.
|
| That is 'one Megabyte' RAM, not Gigabyte.
| tim-- wrote:
| The Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical is an amazing mouse. I've been
| trying to find a keyboard and mouse combo similar to the Apple
| Space Grey mouse and keyboard, and there is nothing to be found
| like it.
|
| It's so depressing. You pay premium prices yet everything looks
| like it belongs in a 15 year olds room.
|
| If I could have something like the apple mouse, with physical
| buttons and a scroll wheel - I would be in my happy place.
|
| The Apple keyboard is such a pleasure to type on.
| heroprotagonist wrote:
| I really wish Roccat would bring back the thumb paddle on their
| mice.
|
| I had this with the Leadr model that they discontinued.
|
| Yes, their software is horrible, but it's not necessary except
| for controlling the lighting. And the lighting is irritating. A
| lot of the custom buttons are superfluous for my needs..
|
| But beyond that? It's a great mouse, the best I've had in
| decades. It's accurate, has great weight and traction, both
| wired/wireless options, and most importantly it has the thumb
| paddle so I can press down or up with my thumb to scroll.
|
| No more repeated rolling of the scroll wheel, or pressing the
| wheel down while dragging the entire mouse forward or back...
|
| Why don't more mice have this? And why'd they get rid of it on
| their newer mice?
| papito wrote:
| Guess what? Hot off the press.
|
| "Razer mouse software bug easily grants Windows admin privileges"
|
| https://www.slashgear.com/razer-mouse-software-bug-easily-gr...
| jeffbee wrote:
| I can't imagine blaming this one on Razer. It's a fundamental
| defect in Windows.
| binkHN wrote:
| Love Razer mice, but never install their software. And, yes,
| the way their installer starts via Windows Update should be
| prevented by Windows.
| r1ch wrote:
| I'd bet good money that there are hundreds if not thousands of
| other buggy installers lurking on windows update, just waiting
| for the right hardware id to appear. Yes, this is a bit of a
| shortcut, but not really any different than booting from a USB
| drive and changing the admin password. Adding Bitlocker to the
| mix is where it starts to get interesting.
| jwilk wrote:
| Another article on the same topic discussed on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28273283
| snarfy wrote:
| All of Razer's products are like that. I've been boycotting them
| since their keyboard wanted me to sign in to use my function
| keys.
| xyst wrote:
| You don't buy Razer products because they have excellent build
| quality. You buy Razer because of the marketing, sadly.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yep, don't forget that Razer were there first.
|
| Does the Roccat software even require registration, or it's
| just bloated because that's all they could do?
|
| I'd even say Razer wins on assholery.
| bostonsre wrote:
| It feels like you're allowing someone to install malware on
| your computer but their mice are sooo nice tho. I don't play
| any computer games, but the deathadder elite is like a hand
| ferarri for work.
| isolli wrote:
| I had trouble believing you at first, but yeah...
| https://twitter.com/mark_roszko/status/1429459359554224135
| ezconnect wrote:
| I stopped using mine when I installed their software that
| requires login to use the mouse 2 extra buttons. It was brand
| new.
| ytjohn wrote:
| But the nice thing about having a Razer mouse is that it lets
| you get local admin on any random computer just by plugging it
| in.
|
| https://twitter.com/j0nh4t/status/1429049506021138437?s=19
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| It's a feature, not a bug ;)
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| I can never forget this classic video of Jonathan Blow trying a
| new Razer keyboard (worth it to stay tuned to the very end)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGO3EG5DC8
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > "My preferred keyboard is one that doesn't have a user
| experience."
|
| Truer words have never been spoken. It's a crying shame that
| "caveat emptor" has become so thoroughly ingrained in the
| tech scene. More and more, I see some gizmo that seems
| interesting, take a deeper look, and run away screaming when
| I find out what a crawling horror it really is.
| user3939382 wrote:
| That was fantastic. I wish I could watch Razer's executive
| team react to this video. I feel like many of us have this
| kind of experience with hardware and software but it's always
| a private suffering.
| kakuri wrote:
| Razer is a terrible company, which is tragic because they
| started out as an amazing hardware company. When they pivoted
| to being a spyware company I stopped buying their hardware.
| I've been happy with SteelSeries so far. Their Rival 500 is a
| great mouse if you want lots of buttons and configurability.
| vultour wrote:
| Most of Razer's hardware is garbage, always has been. The
| only exception is probably Blade and a narrow selection of
| their mice.
| blueflow wrote:
| Can we have twitter banned from being posted here? On all UI
| clicks, a nagging window comes up. You can click it away, but it
| *reverts your click*, so any kind of navigation becomes really
| cumbersome.
| jstanley wrote:
| Here's a workaround: once the nag window comes up, refresh the
| page, and then you get to look at what you clicked on.
| tester34 wrote:
| or twitter urls being replaced with some twitter2readable
| converter
| Semaphor wrote:
| I hate twitter, but just foone alone makes the effort worth it
| for me.
| lostgame wrote:
| HN, for whatever unbelievable reason - supports paywalled
| articles you can't even read without subscriptions.
|
| I hardly think they'll stop approving _Twitter_ threads here.
| At least they're readable without hacks or workarounds.
| [deleted]
| jfax wrote:
| USB mice alone was a mistake. We didn't need anything more
| complicated than rs-232.
| Svperstar wrote:
| I have been using Zowie mice for years. Plug and play NO software
| to download. Best mice for FPS I have ever used.
| skyfaller wrote:
| I'll second this. I've had a Zowie FK1 since 2015 (when I was
| serious about playing Dota 2) and it's still going strong.
| skyfaller wrote:
| For anyone interested in open hardware mice, I have to recommend
| Ploopy: https://ploopy.co/
|
| Plug-and-play, flash your own firmware if you like. Current
| models ship with QMK (open firmware), although I believe my older
| trackball didn't, I'd have to flash it.
|
| I have both a left-handed trackball (rare!) and a right-handed
| mouse from them, I like to alternate.
|
| Two obvious complaints:
|
| - They're really expensive
|
| - They're 3D-printed, which means manufacturing isn't polished.
| My trackball had a sticky mousewheel, which I ultimately had to
| buy a replacement for and swap out. My mouse has some rough edges
| I haven't filed down yet, and the 3D-printed texture may not be
| for everyone.
|
| The good news is that it's easy to make replacement parts and
| repairs yourself!
|
| Still, I wish they would make mass-produced versions with more
| conventional and precise manufacturing techniques, just with the
| option to 3D-print your own parts if you feel like it / need to.
| Maybe that would bring the price down while also improving build
| quality.
| avree wrote:
| Wow, those mice look truly horrible to use, and cost $200 to
| boot.
| apricot wrote:
| a) Cheap
|
| b) Well made
|
| c) Open source/hardware
|
| Choose any two.
| system2 wrote:
| Last thing I want to hold a crappy 3d print textured mouse
| under my hands for 10 hours. I will take my chances with
| Logitech and stick to mx master. $130 for a mouse? Are you
| serious.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| They have parts like PMW3360 in a mouse clearly intended for
| office use, judging by its shape; no wonder it's expensive.
| This is a sensor designed for extremely fast movements in games
| (faster than punches in most martial arts). It's not the latest
| and hottest model, but you won't be able to tell the difference
| from a cheap sensor during normal use.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I wish they made alternative PCBs for existing mice. So you'd
| get the nice finish of molded parts, with an open firmware.
| nabakin wrote:
| I can't connect to your link
| trey-jones wrote:
| Wordpress DB is down. Did we kill it?
| nabakin wrote:
| I first clicked the link only 2-4 minutes after it was
| posted and it was down so I doubt
| rcoveson wrote:
| Welp, LAMP stack doesn't scale. Time to hire some
| microservices teams and set up a k8s cluster.
| ycuser2 wrote:
| Can't reach their website here.
| lelanthran wrote:
| You can't have "really expensive" and "crap quality" without
| going out of business.
|
| It's a pity they don't sell the electronic bits (preloaded with
| the firmware). I can probably fashion quite a nice trackball
| enclosure from a block of wood; probably much nicer than 3D
| printed cheap-feeling plastic.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Tesla is still in business.
|
| I'd be very curious to hear more about how you would go about
| making a wood enclosure, because I thought the same thing,
| but I do not have any woodworking skills. I have gotten used
| to the 3D-printed texture but I wouldn't mind having a nice
| wooden enclosure instead.
|
| I have been very impressed by Keyboardio's use of wood, for
| example: https://shop.keyboard.io/ I got an Atreus with a
| wooden palmrest for my partner, who loves it and uses it
| daily. I just haven't found an open hardware mouse with
| similar build quality yet.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I'd be very curious to hear more about how you would go
| about making a wood enclosure, because I thought the same
| thing
|
| Mill two halves, then screw them together with the
| electronics inside?
|
| File/Sand/Plane down a block for the top, hollow out the
| interior and close off the hollow with a thin balsa sheet?
|
| The way I made propellers - with a craft knife, cut the
| wafer thin sheets sold by model airplane stores with
| successive concentric overlapping ovals for each 1mm height
| of the enclosure. Glue them all together and sand it down
| smooth.
| germ wrote:
| It's all open hardware, so you can run off your own if your
| so inclined and design wood enclosures.
|
| The draw of these is that they are fully (properly)
| programmable and can run QMK.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I get the appeal of that for keyboards, but what's the
| appeal of it for a mouse? Is it only for g*mers?
| rustyminnow wrote:
| I don't game much anymore, but using a gaming mouse in my
| day-to-day workflow is huge. Besides the normal browser
| history-back/fwd, I have buttons for scrolling through
| tabs, closing/reopening tabs, alt-tabbing between
| windows, changing volume, etc. I don't make much use of
| macros or anything, but if I worked in CAD or Photoshop
| I'm sure I would. I think any kind of workflow that's
| hotkey or shortcut heavy could benefit.
| germ wrote:
| Hardware drag scrolling, combos and snippets, more
| configuration then you can swing a stick at, layers and
| all of that. Half of the reason I use QMK boards is due
| to on-host configuration being so so terrible. At least
| if I bring my own hardware I _know_ it's going to work
| how I expect when I plug it in. That's a huge sell if you
| are jumping between computers all the time and have
| hardware that fits in your purse.
|
| Also, the form factor and things like the Ploopy Nano are
| super cool. And because it's open source if you don't
| like the hardware/software you can easily change it. We
| use interface devices all day, everyday. Not having an
| ergonomic interface will catch up with you.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I never use the side buttons for forward/back, it would
| be useful to me to reassign them to something like next
| tab or page down.
| techwolf wrote:
| I use a "gaming" mouse (Logitech G502) for day-to-day
| work. In additional to the usual left/right/middle click
| and up/down/left/right scroll, I have forward/back,
| copy/paste, next/previous tab, close/reopen tab, jump-to-
| first-tab, refresh, zoom reset, and microphone mute. It's
| useful enough that I find I really miss it when using a
| less-capable mouse.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Amazing that it's not only 200 and not high quality, but it's
| called "ploopy"
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Not gonna lie, one of the nice (unintended I'm sure) consequences
| of no one making software for Linux is the extremely wide range
| of hardware drivers built-in. I've never had a mouse (and a bunch
| of other hardware) not work on Linux in the last 15 or so years.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Windows have built-in driver(s) for all the mouses too. You can
| just ignore these additional software and they work fine (as
| fine it gets in Linux, of course. Some additional feature may
| not work.)
| gtsteve wrote:
| Yes, this is why I don't buy Razer equipment anymore. No, I do
| not want to sign up for a Razer account so I can control my DPI
| settings!
|
| Not only that, it automatically installed the software somehow
| when I plugged it in, which I didn't want.
| 55555 wrote:
| I don't use Twitter, so this is new to me, but I found this to be
| interesting because it's not your standard blog post turned into
| a tweet storm; it's a livestream over text. It's an altogether
| different experience. I rarely see a livestream over text.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Startup idea: Subscription mouse.
| SevenSigs wrote:
| sell mouse movements to drug companies so that they know who to
| show Parkinson disease ads to...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also plenty of companies might be interested in what you're
| looking at when you switch to using the mouse with your non-
| dominant hand.
| ummwhat wrote:
| I want to renew my subscription, but I can't click renew.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Don't worry, the mouse will click it for you, automatically!
| falcolas wrote:
| It has a dedicated "renew/upgrade" button, conveniently
| located where the left click button used to be.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The maas (mouse-as-a-service) requires that you install the
| companion app through which you can activate your mouse and
| conveniently renew. It does require access to contacts, media
| and location services though but you can trust them.
| ivolimmen wrote:
| Pay per click license or subscription with a base set of clicks
| per month with a lower per click price. We also sell keyboards
| with the same golden customer service.
|
| Platinum level sold separately.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| 158MB mouse driver. Lololol
| dbg31415 wrote:
| And all this BS where I have to sign in, and download 200 MB
| files... and still no "chords" features on mainstream mice. I
| have Macros... but those are limited to how many buttons my mouse
| has.
|
| Like with Chords...
|
| Press Button 1 = Macro 1.
|
| Press Button 1 + Shift = Macro 2.
|
| Press Button 1 + Button 3 = Macro 7
|
| Chords are so powerful but haven't really been adopted... Razer
| just adds more buttons to their Mice. And there's a limit to how
| many buttons you can add! Ha.
|
| I could do more with a three-button mouse and software that
| supports Chords than I can with their like 19-button
| monstrosities.
|
| http://acme.cat-v.org/mouse
| secondcoming wrote:
| My Dell laptop had an 800MB Realtek audio driver update. If I
| uninstall the Realtek stuff then the 3.5mm headphone socket
| doesn't work.
| vultour wrote:
| My old laptop had a Killer network driver that was bundled with
| some management bullshit which allowed you to limit
| ingress/egress bandwidth. It also had a known issue where it
| used 100% of your SSD I/O bandwidth by constantly rewriting a
| random file. I guess it was aptly named after all.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| And I thought on my companys HP ZBook the sound driver is huge
| with 500MB in RAM.
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| It must be a multiuser mouse.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I presume other user is NSA?
| SevenSigs wrote:
| Why would they need that when they already have low level
| access to your computer?
| npmaile wrote:
| just for fun
| Ensorceled wrote:
| stay in game shape
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Love my Mac and most of apple's policies
| calaverainfo wrote:
| Apple do literally the same thing with their Mac Windows
| drivers.
|
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/24118/how-to-downl...
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| You should buy a standard mouse, no driver needed. A mouse and
| its protocol is prety simple, but now we achieved the state where
| a USB connected mouse reports itself as 5 mouse and 3 keyboard
| and some other HID capable device, good luck using them on legacy
| or alternative operating systems. (Hint: won't work).
|
| >Bbbbuut what about my programable buttons, led and whatever?
|
| I don't care about that, i care only about that i should be able
| to buy standard mouse which is always harder and harder task
| because you buy every piece of s with rgb leds so they will stop
| to produce non-manchild computer hardware. I wouldn't care at all
| if the hw would still provide the basic functionality without any
| special driver, but nooo, thats too much.
|
| Proposal: send the hw back to their HQ and demand your money
| back.
| moftz wrote:
| I like my mouse with programmable macro buttons. It doesn't
| have any fancy lights, just a small multi-purpose indicator
| that shows battery level, sensitivity level, and which set of
| macros I'm using.
|
| I also like my $0 basic USB mouse that works with everything I
| plug it into. I think it came with a Dell PC but who knows as
| the logo has worn off. My fancy macro button mouse never leaves
| my desk but my cheap mouse has had plenty of travel. Same with
| my keyboard, I've got a nice one for my desk and a dirt cheap
| compact one that travels.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| Dell sells (because i am pretty sure they don't manufacture
| them) really crappy input devices nowadays. I sent countless
| back directly to their Munich HQ.
| floatboth wrote:
| I'm not aware of a _single_ modern mouse that doesn 't use
| regular HID for actual basic mousing.
|
| All these mice will work as basic HID mice in any operating
| system. If your legacy OS can't handle "5 mouse and 3
| keyboard", its HID support was completely broken in the first
| place.
| kapitalx wrote:
| I really enjoyed the progression of this thread's "Spite"
| hacking. I've gone down similar rabbit holes before.
| jmuguy wrote:
| One reason, among many, to avoid products marketed towards
| gamers.
| darkteflon wrote:
| In principle agree, but I recently switched to a Logitech G Pro
| X Superlight to use exclusively as a work mouse, and for me the
| 63g weight trumps everything about "business" mice. Over the
| years I've owned MX Masters, Marathons, Triathlons, Microsoft
| mice and others. The Superlight - for me personally - is
| substantially better for work applications than any other mouse
| I've ever used. It's so comfortable and precise. Kicking myself
| for not switching earlier.
|
| EDIT: Subject to my comments above about Logitech software on
| Macs.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| It's a shame they went with an outdated charging port.
| Probably to have something easy to upgrade on the next
| version.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| IMO there are a lot of quality products in the gaming segment.
| The main problem is that the segment is bloated by so many "X
| but with LEDs and a higher price tag". You just have to do a
| bit more research before any purchase.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Gamer mouse are actually very tough and last a long time, like
| 5 to 10 years. The software usually is the first to break
| during the years of usage. Since 2000 I only bought 3 Logitech
| mouse and once tried Razor but the button double clicked broke
| in just a few months and never tried them again. All 3 Logitech
| mouse still works except for the oldest one because the drivers
| don't work anymore and I can't use the extra buttons, but as a
| mouse it still works.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Interestingly enough, the only reasonably high DPI mouse
| manufacturer I've found that actually has functional config
| software on Mac is Steelseries.
| matoro wrote:
| I have this same mouse. It works perfectly fine as an HID-
| compliant mouse on Linux, including the forward/back buttons. You
| only need all that crap if you want to control the rainbow RGB
| lighting. And if you _really_ that, there 's a reverse-engineered
| driver here: http://roccat.sourceforge.net/
| arendtio wrote:
| You might want to add, that Roccat supported the reverse
| engineering effort in this case by providing hardware and
| approving the use of certain sound files:
|
| > The reversed hardware is kindly provided by Roccat.
|
| > The sound files and the Roccat logo are property of Roccat
| and are used with their approval.
|
| A few years back, I owned a Roccat mouse myself and was
| delighted to find a decent Linux driver for it.
| floatboth wrote:
| There's also libratbag, which contains RGB/DPI/extra-button/etc
| control for a variety of mice from many many vendors
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| If you want a graphical frontend for libratbag there's piper.
| randomtandom wrote:
| Xtrfy ftw
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Christ, what a nightmare.
|
| I'm lucky I guess in that my mouse preference is actually the
| Apple mouse. I've tried a bunch of others of the years and keep
| coming back to it.
|
| I'm definitely aware of the shitshow that is peripheral drivers.
| It's always been bad, but now it's just awful awful awful. Even
| if someone introduced a mouse that appealed to me, I'd be hard
| pressed to bother given my suspicion that the software required
| would be terrible.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Are you referring to the default Apple corded mouse they ship
| with iMacs or the Magic Mouse? Magic Mouse is nice, but of
| course isn't for everyone. I have it for my dev machines but
| trying to use it for playing most types of reaction style games
| is a nightmare. BootCamp driver compatibility is also not
| really there. I have never been able to get my Magic Mouse to
| scroll using the touch motion on Windows, for instance.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| As has been copiously pointed out, I don't think a corded
| mouse has been an option from Apple for a long, long time.
|
| I mean the Magic Mouse -- the one that makes some people
| enraged because you can't use it and charge it at the same
| time. (Turns out: this is literally never a problem.)
|
| Of course, mice (and keyboards, and pens, and notebooks, and
| and and and and) are intensely personal items, and what works
| for me is just that: what works for me. I don't really use
| Windows except in remote desktop sessions, so compatibility
| with MSFT doesn't matter to me. I don't play games on my
| computer much anymore, but when I did I used a trackball
| that, if memory serves, didn't require any drivers.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Apple hasn't shipped a corded mouse for four years.
| spijdar wrote:
| For anyone else momentarily confused by this, they stopped
| selling the last corded mouse four years ago, but haven't
| _bundled_ a corded mouse with any computer since 2009
| AFAIK. Which makes the comment about "corded mouse they
| ship with iMacs" feel even older.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Interesting, I could have sworn they were bundling the
| corded mouse with iMacs circa 2015. Are you sure about
| your comment about bundling?
|
| In any event, yes I did not know they stopped shipping
| them but that is only a good thing. I think the polite
| way to describe the quality of those mice is _not very
| good_. Several more impolite terms come to mind.
| spijdar wrote:
| I'm not certain, but I believe they started shipping the
| flat magic mouse, er, mice with the 2009 iMacs and 2010
| Mac Pros. Unless you only got the magic mouse with an
| upcharge? That could be the case, although I think it was
| standard.
|
| I traded my own iMac in a few years ago, but got to keep
| the peripherals. I'm not a huge fan of the, uh, flat
| ergonomics, but it is an _amazing_ mouse when you need
| one to throw in a laptop bag, and the sensors are top
| notch when it comes to actual tracking. If only it came
| in a more ergonomic shape...
| tim-- wrote:
| The latest Bootcamp drivers fix this.
| system2 wrote:
| Good luck with it when your mouse downloads all your photo
| library and send it to government, soon.
| bane wrote:
| The rest of the thread is an interesting look at how an attempt
| to protect their devices actually revealed several hidden ones.
| xxxtentachyon wrote:
| I I'lli
| megamix wrote:
| stop software now!
| linker3000 wrote:
| Ah, mice...
|
| "Need local admin and have physical access? ..."
|
| https://twitter.com/j0nh4t/status/1429049506021138437
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It is pretty trivial to get local admin on any desktop or
| workstation with physical access, though typically doing so
| requires at least one reboot. User accounts are basically
| worthless, from a security standpoint, in that scenario.
| shawnz wrote:
| It's not trivial, and even so that's not a reason to
| discredit this particular vulnerability just because others
| also exist.
|
| What is the point of downplaying local privilege escalation
| vulnerabilities just because it's a hard scenario to defend
| against?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > It's not trivial
|
| In my experience, it is in fact pretty trivial.
|
| I'm not saying it shouldn't be fixed, I'm saying it isn't
| nrealy as big a deal as people are making it out to be. The
| infosec community likes to latch on to any little
| vulnerability it can and act like the sky is falling even
| if, when taken in context, said vulnerability is only a
| problem in narrow use cases or requires the target to
| pretty much already be completely exploited.
| shawnz wrote:
| > In my experience, it is in fact pretty trivial.
|
| If you are talking about scenarios where full disk
| encryption is not enabled, then that is irrelevant. You
| may as well say that privilege escalation is trivial
| because some users don't put passwords on their account.
| The user obviously needs to take care of the basic
| expectancies first before worrying about vulnerabilities.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > If you are talking about scenarios where full disk
| encryption is not enabled, then that is irrelevant.
|
| That's fair, I was making that assumption because it is
| true in literally every case I've come across. But
| consider that if you have local access to a logged in
| account you've already got access to unencrypted files
| for that user anyway. You don't even need admin.
| shawnz wrote:
| Sure, but consider how this will impact corporate or
| educational environments (which in my experience DO
| usually use full disk encryption). I believe full disk
| encryption is also on by default for most new OEM
| machines.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The infosec community likes to latch on to any little
| vulnerability it can and act like the sky is falling
|
| That's because while a given potential exploit might not
| be a huge deal, a collection of exploits become greater
| than the sum of their parts, so if you're security-
| minded, then you want as few of those parts as possible.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Sure, but you always have tradeoffs for implementation
| time, interface friction, etc. You need to scope things
| properly so people know how to prioritize them and, in my
| experience, infosec people are really bad at that.
| They're so ready to hype up whatever they found that they
| don't really care how it relates to the real world.
| q3k wrote:
| It's made quite a bit more difficult with FDE dependent on
| TPM and Secure Boot (like Bitlocker). Can't mount the drive
| from another machine or the same machine with another OS
| running to modify the password file, can't run a bootkit like
| KonBoot to disable password checks.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > It's made quite a bit more difficult with FDE...
|
| FDE is orthogonal to user accounts, but yes it would
| prevent the trivial local access methods of taking over the
| admin account.
|
| Not that, you know, anything the user cares about requires
| an admin account to get at anyway, as ransomware has
| consistently proven.
| MAGZine wrote:
| What a ridiculous argument. User files are important, but
| locking down admin access has solved a whole host of
| virus/security issues that were present in, say, windows
| xp.
|
| at the end of the day, users are responsible for the
| software they run on their machine. but viruses/worms
| that run amok are largely over thanks to restraining
| userland permissions.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Every time I've achieved domain admin on a pentest, it's been
| predicated with local privesc.
|
| Your opinion is dangerous, professional negligence.
| OGWhales wrote:
| Related post to the one you linked:
| https://twitter.com/an0n_r0/status/1429386474902917124
| linker3000 wrote:
| Yes, I saw that for the first time moments after I posted my
| comment!
| xeromal wrote:
| I have this mouse and it makes me sad. It's actually a solid
| mouse too!
| toxik wrote:
| Refuse to buy products like this, please. We don't need our USB
| mice turning into printer-level headaches.
| Silhouette wrote:
| I'd love to but there mostly seem to be two separate markets
| now. You can have cheap junk with minimal features or you can
| have "gamer" hardware with an extra 0 on the price, components
| that _might_ be much better but sometimes aren 't, the kind of
| driver hell we're talking about, and lots of coloured lights.
|
| I miss the days when Logitech made great, comfortable mice for
| normal desktop use, with a small number of useful extra
| controls and a minimal driver and UI to choose what they did. I
| miss the days when you could buy a comfortable typist's
| keyboard for a sensible amount of money.
|
| I literally don't know a single brand that reliably makes good
| keyboards and mice for normal use any more. Every single one
| (and I've tried most of the big names) produces junk. Even in
| the PS100+ range that is supposed to be high-end hardware, I
| have probably returned more than half of the products I've
| bought in the past few years because they had obvious serious
| defects out of the box or developed them within a few months of
| normal use.
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| I have a Ducky One keyboard, very simple, mechanical keys,
| well built, no RGB, no additional drivers, and doesn't seem
| like it will quit working any time soon.
| h2odragon wrote:
| FYI: Unicomp still makes Model M keyboards (with USB! and
| Windows keys! if you want them); and Elecom trackballs are
| _wonderful_
|
| I'm hard on that stuff; i killed multiple _original_ 90 's
| manufactured Model M's and wore out a stack of MS trackballs
| over those 2 decades. One of the fancy logitech "G" blinky
| lights keyboards lasted less than 3mo under my hands.
| Kensington cheap trackballs quit moving right in days and
| stop working in months.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > i killed multiple original 90's manufactured Model M's
|
| ...how? I'm fairly sure I could bludgeon a man to death
| with my model M and run it over with a truck and it would
| still work.
| h2odragon wrote:
| severe hand psoriasis, and heavy use. Can't really abide
| gloves or keyboard condoms either.
| vultour wrote:
| I know many people aren't happy with Corsair but I bought the
| rather ridiculously expensive K95 keyboard years ago (it's
| different now), and haven't had any issue with it apart from
| killing some of the media buttons when I spilt coffee all
| over it recently. I don't think it's anywhere near getting
| replaced.
|
| Other than that I have one of the cheaper models of Das
| Keyboard for work and have been nothing but happy with it.
| Also upgraded it with some o-rings so people around me don't
| want to kill me.
|
| I use both without installing any junk.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _I know many people aren 't happy with Corsair_
|
| You're talking to one of them. Disappointing failures of
| both mouse and keyboard resulting in returning hundreds of
| pounds worth of supposedly high-end products within months
| of purchase. At least one of the problems I had was also
| getting reported by others by the time I sent that product
| back, so it also looks like a design flaw and not just bad
| luck. I think you also need to install their resource-
| hungry, crash-prone software to make use of most of the
| special features too, though that's hardly relevant if keys
| are falling off and buttons aren't registering presses
| anyway.
|
| I wouldn't even consider buying more peripherals from
| Corsair for a while. The quality isn't there and they don't
| work properly in a you-had-one-job kind of way. Worst of a
| bad bunch in my experience.
| burnished wrote:
| Agreed. This might be the right time to make recommendations as
| well though, I think a big part of people not buying nicer
| stuff (things that aren't spying on you) is simply that they
| don't know about it. Or that its too high-friction. Which again
| leads to they don't know about a solution that will actually
| work for them.
| 6510 wrote:
| When the USB standard took over the galaxy I was baffled. I mean,
| what could possibly go wrong here? <hysterical-laughter>
| 6510 wrote:
| In my book A mouse should be 3 buttons, 3 potentiometers, 7
| wires, a plug and a plastic box. Worse that can happen is a
| short connecting all wires together - then nothing bad happens
| to the computer. Nothing!
|
| The PS/2 DIN was already doing more than I wanted, bi-
| directional communication is already more than you need to make
| the device work.
|
| Perhaps there are exotic mice to be had that deserve to
| communicate over USB, with elaborate drivers and all the
| trimmings. Internet connectivity, bootloaders, flashing leds
| etc.
|
| Ofc you would have to have an USB port to use those which can
| be undesirable You can plug anything into those. Next the user
| will download software from the internet and install it. Wild
| concept. lol
| VortexDream wrote:
| I use the Malwarebytes Windows Firewall Control. It's always
| interesting to see what applications or services are making
| internet requests. Much of it ends up being Windows services, but
| still.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| st_goliath wrote:
| > todo item added: Figure out a way to mass-download all the
| auto-updating drivers
|
| > todo item added: Start sniffing the protocol this tool uses to
| reprogram the mouse so I can build a cross-platform tool for it.
|
| This does sound like an intriguing idea. For all those crappy
| Windows drivers that come with an 300 MiB+ Electron based
| configuration UI, auto updater, etc... figure out how to get the
| _actual driver binaries_ and build a script that downloads and
| repackages them using NSIS.
|
| One could in theory build some kind of Qemu based sandbox
| framework that snapshots the disk and extracts the binaries after
| installation. Tricking the updater into actually installing the
| driver inside a VM without the hardware might be a bit tricky,
| but depending on how they do the check (e.g. look if the USB ID
| is present?), I guess it should be doable and might be a bit
| easier than the reverse engineering approach in this Twitter
| thread (and also easier to automate, so it does not just work for
| this particular device).
|
| I fear the biggest challenge for such a project would be dealing
| with the hardware vendors legal department though.
| megous wrote:
| Or just reverse their stupid ass USB protocol, and don't run
| their software stack at all. No legal threats with that,
| because RE for interoperability is legal.
|
| Controlling USB devices is rather simple, once you know the
| format of "packets" they send to their interface endpoints, to
| control the device. Format can often times be deduced from
| observing the URBs in wireshark while clicking around the
| vendor's app.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > Or just reverse their stupid ass USB protocol
|
| My point is that gets a bit tedious for sufficiently large
| number of stupid ass USB devices. You might want a simpler to
| automate approach, and possibly something where you don't
| have to deal with binary driver signing yourself, which is
| rather expensive if you are doing this for a hobby.
|
| > No legal threats with that, because RE for interoperability
| is legal.
|
| The local _copyright_ law where I live agrees with that
| assessment. I take it you did the necessary research for
| wherever you live?
|
| But what if your reverse engineered driver infringes one of
| their stupid ass patents? What about trademarks (e.g. if you
| try to advertise it as a replacement for the official device
| driver)?
|
| You do know that even if you are totally in the right, that
| does not necessarily stop them from suing you anyway?
| Regardless of who is actually right, this will end up costing
| you a lot of time, money and nerves.
|
| I'd be very careful making legal assessments like that as an
| engineer. Responding to a legal threat totally unprepared and
| with a response like that will make the "sue you anyway"
| scenario very likely.
| megous wrote:
| Good points.
| system2 wrote:
| We really should have some regulations regarding standard drivers
| for all devices and compatibility of them. I am dreaming I know,
| we don't even have right to repair yet.
| andi999 wrote:
| Next thing it will ask for your social media credentials, might
| even post a few status updates.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > and an obvious question: if I do, will I get back any "secret"
| products that aren't in the "all products" list?
|
| > "Beast Man Premium"
|
| That has to be some sort of USB-controlled pneumatic dragon dildo
| soheil wrote:
| This is absurd. There is no winning with this guy:
|
| > good news: I got the URL it's requesting! bad news: it does its
| own certificate validation so it's erroring out at the self-
| signed root cert I have installed for MITM use.
|
| > GOOD SWEET LORD THEY ARE SCARED OF PEOPLE STEALING THEIR
| DRIVERS
|
| Which one is it, is it good that they use encryption to protect
| their users where they can or not? Please make up your mind.
| detaro wrote:
| He isn't complaining that they use encryption.
| soheil wrote:
| He's complaining that he couldn't MITM their https requests.
| detaro wrote:
| correct, because thats the usual expectation: application
| should respect what the OS trusts.
| underscore_ku wrote:
| just use linux
| [deleted]
| kop316 wrote:
| What gets me the most is seeing something like piper:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27871956
|
| Where its (mainly) one person in their spare time that is able to
| put these official drivers to shame.
| Jnr wrote:
| If you are on Linux and using fancy gaming mouse, there is a
| chance you can configure it with the open source libratbag
| (console app) or Piper (GUI app). It won't make any network
| requests. :)
| system2 wrote:
| I wish not to tinker 3 days to setup my mouse.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The nature of these devices is that they're HID compliant but
| Microsoft lets them get away with demanding you should
| "improve" things by installing extra software on Windows.
|
| Because they're HID compliant they do just work out of the
| box (on Windows or on Linux).
|
| In Linux there is no "Oh! Oh! Install this proprietary
| bullshit to wring more money out of you. Please. Please! Come
| on, spare a few bucks!" step. If you don't want to do any
| tinkering the mouse Just Works(tm)
|
| But if you wish the little features worked, like apparently
| changing LED light colours, you can install third party
| software. At _that_ point yes you are tinkering, but you aren
| 't dealing with constant appeals to please let it change your
| default web browser, or whatever like in Windows, so that
| still seems like you're ahead.
|
| I'm astonished Microsoft didn't just outright ban this
| nonsense. It's an _awful_ user experience compared to Linux
| where all this stuff _Just Works_ and Windows could have that
| too, not with more engineering work but with _less_ by simply
| not allowing this crap.
| kop316 wrote:
| ??
|
| https://github.com/libratbag/piper
|
| it's a GUI app, it looks pretty nice. It's also in the Debian
| repos, so you can just install it with "apt install piper"
|
| Looks pretty simple to me.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Installing piper on linux and using it to configure your
| mouse will most likely be faster than using the
| manufacturer's software.
|
| Also no tinkering required if your mouse is supported by
| libratbag.
| malwrar wrote:
| So, the "driver" here is just a downloader/auto-updater to fetch
| the actual drivers based on usb id... definitely a letdown, I
| thought there would be a substantial issue here. I feel like
| infosec Twitter hasn't heard of Hanlon's razor, or maybe they
| just like being mad all the time over nothing. This thread
| unravels into mundanity as the author's network traffic
| observations reveal the only _actual_ issue is that drivers are
| downloaded over cleartext.
| spcebar wrote:
| Before jumping in and complaining about the Twitter format, jump
| to the bottom of the twitter thread where someone has almost
| certainly unrolled it. And remember Foone hates being linked on
| hacker news and didn't ask to be here.
| globular-toast wrote:
| How do I get to the bottom? It seems to have doom scrolling.
| mellavora wrote:
| well, obviously, you use the scroll wheel .. on your . ...
| ...
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| Nitpick: You probably meant to write "endless scroll" or
| "infinite scroll". "Doom scrolling" is a verb for obsessively
| browsing bad news.
| Lammy wrote:
| You can't have the behavior without the mechanism. To me
| "doom scrolling" is infinite scrolling plus
| algorithmically-sorted feed, way worse than infinitely-
| scrolling a chronological feed where people will stop and
| go do something else as soon as they see anything for a
| second time.
| tomrod wrote:
| Why does the author's desire for community discussion factor in
| -- is that internet etiquette now?
| kristofferR wrote:
| No, of course not, that would be incredibly stupid. If you
| don't want to get published then don't publish.
| burnished wrote:
| I think that the important bit is that if you've got
| vitriol to spill about the twitter format that you keep it
| sealed. I'm guessing you don't care, which is right and
| good, but some people get upset (and presumably inform the
| authors) about twitter style posts.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Think of it like those "Please respect our neighbours" signs
| that bars post outside their establishment.
| XaspR8d wrote:
| I assumed it was just being used as additional evidence that
| you shouldn't tie any frustration with this post/its format
| to original original author.
| OGWhales wrote:
| https://nitter.net/Foone/status/1146135405793669121
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post off-topic comments that mirror the off-topic
| comments you're complaining about. It does about the same
| amount of damage to the thread.
|
| (I've marked this subthread offtopic now.)
| stinkytaco wrote:
| OK, I did as suggested. Now can I complain about the Twitter
| format?
| detaro wrote:
| No.
|
| > _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-
| button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common
| to be interesting._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| city41 wrote:
| It looks like you need to be logged in now to do that, which is
| a relatively recent change.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I think it's all about branding, the same disgrace that plagues
| mobile operating systems: every software maker tries its best to
| force users install their logo on their screen, so that if
| yesterday one could use 100 services just by saving 100 bookmarks
| on a browser, now they need 100 apps, with all the implications
| wrt waste of space and resources, security etc. Although
| perfectly legit, it's a practice that cannot scale.
|
| Drivers installers on Windows aren't exempt from this nonsense as
| well since years, so every driver started coming with its
| companion app, very often a huge VB "thing" that did nothing
| important except showing its shiny icon on the desktop. Then
| years later they started phoning home to profile users, attempt
| to offer purchases for consumables (as printer drivers do), etc.
| In the old days however one had a way to control it: the .exe was
| often a self extracting .zip, so it could be fed to 7Zip and the
| like to extract the archive without executing it, then one would
| throw away the unnecessary bloat except the relevant .inf file
| and a few dlls or other small files, point to that location when
| searching for drivers, and voila: driver installed without the
| cruft.
|
| The question is if a giant ball of Electron bloat could be
| dissected in a similar fashion in order to extract the important
| stuff and throw away the rest. I hope so.
| 5faulker wrote:
| Apparently bureaucracy is not just an office thing.
| chris37879 wrote:
| The good news is, almost definitely! It's really hard to
| protect web apps from reverse engineering because a lot of
| decisions were made to make them out of human readable files
| ages ago, almost any electron app can be broken open and
| tinkered with, there are exceptions, though. VSCode, for
| instance, is an electron app, but basically only for their UI
| at this point, larges swathes of the app's interesting
| functionality is written in cross compiled C++. But for an
| electron app that's just tweaking settings in a Driver?
| Probably. Ultimately the electron code cannot be very tightly
| integrated since that's not how drivers work, but then it
| becomes an arms race of weird protocols to force you into using
| their app instead of an alternative and we're back to square 1,
| only now the device has this weird opaque, and possibly crypto
| signed api for controlling it instead of just bit banging
| values into memory
| freediver wrote:
| What you described brings back distant memories of Windows.
| Since switching to macOS few years ago none of that behavior is
| a thing any more. Apps 'just work' and do so in a predictable
| way. There is no (noticeable) attempt from app makers to bundle
| bloat. This alone makes macOS much more comfortable to work
| with.
| amelius wrote:
| > The question is if a giant ball of Electron bloat could be
| dissected in a similar fashion in order to extract the
| important stuff and throw away the rest. I hope so.
|
| Perhaps OSes could be smarter. After installing an app, it
| could monitor the "hot" paths in the code, and only load those
| instructions the next time the app is loaded. Also resources
| that are never used could be not loaded into memory. Etc. I
| know, it would be difficult to build this as you're basically
| instrumenting an app or driver and then rewriting it, but I
| guess it would be a great innovative feature in a time when OS
| research seems stagnant.
| arghnoname wrote:
| What you're describing is some combination of stuff language
| runtimes and linkers do (shared libraries, runtime loading,
| JITting) and demand paging.
|
| It may be the case that one could optimize for the case where
| a bunch of applications ship that and are statically compiled
| but use the same underlying libraries. In this case, some
| agent on the system could analyze the code segments of these
| binaries and on demand construct shared libraries that strip
| the shared portion from the binaries. Subsequent invocations
| would load the constructed shared libraries for redundant
| sections.
|
| Still, this probably wouldn't help much and would lead to its
| own issues. One of the problems with these flabby things is
| just how the runtimes are themselves constructed. You still
| have per process data structures you'd need to populate and
| they probably have fat data structures that are not very
| space efficient, and so on. The size of the instructions is
| probably not significant relatively speaking.
| amelius wrote:
| One trick could be to run the program in a "lazy" way. E.g.
| don't run a statement like "a=b+c", but evaluate it only
| when a is needed. This would require a complete and
| automatic rewrite at the assembly level, but you wouldn't
| be doing anything that you don't need. Then from this you
| could determine the "hot" paths, and optimize those for
| speed (translate back into non-lazy form).
| cowvin wrote:
| Optimizing hot paths is already done via PGO
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-
| guided_optimization).
| wrs wrote:
| I can't find a reference now, but I believe Windows did
| (does?) have a page fault tracer that would preload from disk
| the pages that are observed to be needed. I can't remember if
| this was just at boot time or for app launches too.
| thekingofravens wrote:
| Avoiding this cycle of crap is my personal favorite thing about
| Linux.
| titzer wrote:
| The cycle of crap on Linux is different; less corporate and
| underhanded, but more of an ever-expanding bloat. Install
| Clang/LLVM. It's like 300MB. I remember when almost every
| system had a fairly small C compiler. It had to be small,
| because it was the basis of everything else. Now the base is
| enormous. OCaml is something like 200MB. And of course, it
| has its own package manager. So does Python, and Ruby, and
| all these other things that are supposed to be the base of so
| much other software.
|
| Take another example. Install LaTeX. It's something like 5GB.
| It's huge because it bundles enormous numbers of packages.
|
| It seems like there are zillions of Linux packages > 100MB.
| What does all this crap do? Why does everything depend on
| everything?
|
| Take another example. Node. Building it from scratch takes a
| pretty beefy machine and a lot of time. (It takes over 20
| mins on my 6-core workstation with 32GB RAM). Most of that is
| building V8. When I worked on V8, we periodically spent some
| time trying to get build times under control, but the needle
| barely moved until it got going again. We spent months and
| months of effort, over years, splitting V8 into more source
| files and more directories and enforcing header discipline,
| but all of it made build times worse. Despite how cool V8 is,
| I feel embarrassed in retrospect that the build system is so
| bonkers.
|
| Linux is like this everywhere. Monstrous and labyrinthine. It
| really is impossible to understand it all now.
| avhception wrote:
| While I share some of your resentment (especially as a
| Gentoo user who builds Chromium quite regularly), a few
| extra gigabytes of storage or a few more config files I
| don't grok are relatively easy to ignore compared to the
| kind of dark patterns I see happening with 3rd party
| software on Windows desktops. And Microsoft itself is
| increasingly willing to sink to that level as well.
| asddubs wrote:
| >Install LaTeX. It's something like 5GB
|
| if you install the full version that has every single
| package for everything, all with their own manuals etc. At
| least on debian-based distros there are options to just get
| the ones relevant to you.
| grifball wrote:
| My gcc is tens of KBs
|
| $ wajig size | grep gcc gcc-5-multilib 6 installed gcc-
| multilib 8 installed gcc 44 installed gcc-6-base 60
| installed gcc-5-base 66 installed libx32gcc1 98 installed
| libgcc1 105 installed lib32gcc1 125 installed
| libx32gcc-5-dev 6,280 installed lib32gcc-5-dev 7,020
| installed libgcc-5-dev 12,193 installed gcc-5 23,648
| installed
| NullPrefix wrote:
| >Install Clang/LLVM. It's like 300MB
|
| Isn't this like a first computer world problem? How many
| gigabytes does current Visual Studio take? Not talking
| about VS Code, because it's only an IDE, which still
| requires the actual Visual Studio C++ as the compiler.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Linux has nothing to do with Node, though. Most of the
| Linux world (and the Windows world, and the OSX world, etc)
| wishes it would just go away forever. Javascript is
| unadulterated pain.
|
| As for Linux package sizes go... why are you installing so
| many packages that you don't need just to complain about
| it?
|
| On Debian and Ubuntu, `dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-
| Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n` will tell you the install
| size of things sorted by worst offender; for me, on one of
| my development machines, is git, followed by Perl packages
| required by the system, neovim, and then a bunch of normal
| things excepted on any install. `df -h` minus `/home` is a
| hair over 600mb.
|
| git, being the largest thing, has an install size of 38
| megs. Indeed, I cannot tell you why git is 38 megs, there
| may or may not be bloat here.
|
| As a comparison, Windows uses around 6GB of space, and a
| MSVC install that has a common set of toolchains may take
| up to 20GB and... arguably does less than my <1GB Linux
| install (when it comes to dev work, anyways).
| Y_Y wrote:
| dpigs from moreutils is also a nice way to find bloated
| packages on Debian-based systems.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > attempt to offer purchases for consumables (as printer
| drivers do)
|
| Or to brick knockoffs! FTDI blazed the trail, now printers are
| doing it too. First party malware!
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Meanwhile I wish they'd still sell the Roccat Savu. I bought it
| on a sale and it turned out to be the most ergonomic mouse I've
| used so far. Runs perfectly fine without the official drivers and
| the few extra buttons have decent default settings.
|
| But I usually avoid "gaming" hardware. Even if it's not
| overpriced it rarely looks good and has the same quality at best.
| serguzest wrote:
| I have been in similar situation with ASUS ROG keyboad and I am
| so mad! Windows automatically installed crapware without my
| consent and it runs as a service. I uninstalled it but it keeps
| coming back.
|
| Do NOT buy ASUS ROG keyboards.
| ubavic wrote:
| I don't have ASUS ROG keyboard, but I unfortunately have ASUS
| ROG motherboard. I experienced similar situation: in order to
| use some basic functionality of the motherboard I had to
| install a bloatware which, by the way, didn't even work
| properly.
|
| I absolutely agree with your last sentence.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Finding a "good" mouse is really freaking difficult. First off,
| you don't know the state of the drivers and control software, as
| this thread demonstrates. Then you don't know the quality of the
| switches, as I found out with several Logitech mice that were
| well reviewed, but I suspect the hardware was switched for
| cheaper variants once the reviews were in. 2 separate Logitech
| mice started double clicking randomly, and their support was
| awful because they didn't have like-for-like replacements unless
| I wanted to wait for months. On top of all that, getting a good
| button layout, size, and shape is a real crapshoot too.
|
| So I bought a sealed-in-box new Logitech G500 from ebay as a
| spare because of course none of the new mice are anything close
| to the quality of the older models. Especially after being burnt
| on switch quality.
|
| The Ploopy mice have an awful name but are definitely intriguing
| to me. QMK firmware is pretty much perfect, and I wish I could
| use it on the Logitech G500.
|
| I used to recommend Roccat mice to people, but their lack of Mac
| and Linux support is a dealbreaker these days.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| FWIW it's not terribly difficult to replace the switches
| yourself on the G500 if you've got the soldering equipment
| already:
|
| I know these switches work and can last a fair bit longer then
| the ones from the factory:
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/omron-electronics...
| bloopernova wrote:
| Following on from this fragmented thought:
|
| I've ruined myself with regards to mice. Over the years I've
| become very used to the G500 format: 2 side buttons for page up
| and page down make web and code browsing very fast. And a
| button by the primary left button is mapped to "show all
| windows" which used to be called expose on Mac, and the
| equivalent in Gnome 40. I've also started recently using
| another button to plain-text-paste, which is surprisingly
| useful when pasting code to coworkers in MS Teams.
| Account_Removed wrote:
| For a long time I have been a Logitech mice user. When the last
| mouse finally gave up ghost, a few years ago, it was time to
| look for a new one. I was unpleasantly surprised how expensive
| Logitech mice were! I told myself that no way I am paying that
| much for a simple mouse and I started looking for a quality
| replacement. I read some reviews and decided to try Gigabyte
| mice. After a few years I can honestly say this was the right
| choice - inexpensive, quality mice. I never looked back to
| Logitech (well... I am still still using G105 keyboard). My few
| years old, worn ECO500 mouse is still working great. For
| laptops I use M7700 (smaller and lighter) and other than the
| rubber grip on the left side needing re-gluing after a few
| years, no problems. The mouse works like new. No problems in
| Ubuntu and no need to install any vendor software/drivers. I
| thought I share my successful story of moving off Logitech.
| There is quality at lower price point out there. My 2 cents...
| Drew_ wrote:
| Zowie has an array of gaming mice that are all high quality and
| driverless.
| vultour wrote:
| I'm also very happy with my Zowie except for a strange thing
| with the mouse wheel - about a year after getting it it
| started making a faint squealing noise, then a few months
| later it miraculously went away. I have a second one at the
| office which has the exact same issue.
|
| I had several Rival 110's before and was similarly happy, I
| like the Zowie a bit more because it's larger.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Logitech is similar, tries to auto-update most days and ~200MB
| "driver" install.
|
| Why the heck does a few hundred KB in _actual_ drivers and a
| simply configuration program need 200MB? When I had an MS mouse
| intellipoint was only ~20MB, and the current MS Mouse & Keyboard
| Center is still only about 50MB (which still seems much larger
| than necessary)
| hyperman1 wrote:
| HP also has gone insane. We got a bunch of keyboards that had 3
| defective keys on the numpad. Zero, slash and enter if I
| remember it, bog standard keys. HP Service desk says no
| problem, here's 512Kb of firmware update that will fix it. And
| it actually did. No hardware defect, just a software bug.
|
| I have no idea why a keyboard without much interesting extras
| even needs 512K of firmware, let alone why the stock firmware
| fails on 3 of the buttons. They're only there since 1985 or so,
| you'd think they got around to test the numeric pad by now
| izacus wrote:
| Well, I'm sure Logitech was sensible like most HackerNews
| developers and saved costs by using Electron for their driver.
| This gives you a nice 300MB+ base package to drive the UI with a
| lot of unneeded code (most likely asking for the firewall
| permissions) and then additional actual driver download.
|
| I'm sure that allowed them to iterate quickly, hire developers
| who know nothing but JS to build their driver package and ship
| the MVP with low costs!
|
| Isn't that the type of software that keeps being defended here?
| ^^
| _joel wrote:
| I think far more people here prefer native apps than Electron.
| I know I do.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Well, I'm sure Logitech was sensible like most HackerNews
| developers and saved costs by using Electron
|
| I'm not here to defend Electron, but most of the things Foone
| is complaining about would be terrible regardless of what base
| they use for the UI, and I'm not really sure what Electron has
| to do with this (or if it's even in use in this case).
|
| The really egregious thing here is asking for a Firewall
| exemption and not including the base driver in the box. A slow
| driver with a giant list of dependencies is bad, but it's bad
| for its own reasons. Electron didn't force the devs not to
| include mouse drivers in the physical box, Electron apps will
| easily fit on a driver CD.
|
| See also some of the other complaints popping up in the comment
| section here:
|
| > I recently bought a Logitech G Pro X Superlight to use as my
| daily driver on an M1 Mac. [...] Runs as root, [...] requires
| manually setting permissions on a config file in order to save
| settings[0]
|
| > Windows Update will download and execute RazerInstaller as
| SYSTEM[1]
|
| > All of Razer's products are like that. I've been boycotting
| them since their keyboard wanted me to sign in to use my
| function keys.[2]
|
| Again, not here to argue that Electron is good, but I don't see
| how any of the above is Electron's fault -- and I think even if
| you were happy with Electron, all of the above would still be
| egregious and unacceptable.
|
| Is the idea that if Razer wasn't using Electron, they wouldn't
| force you to create an online account and to stay continuously
| logged in for your function keys to work? I don't think I
| believe that.
|
| ----
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274711
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274594
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28275254
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The really egregious thing here is asking for a Firewall
| exemption and not including the base driver in the box.
|
| A million times this. The electron thing is a sideshow. The
| real problem is asking for too much in the way of security
| exceptions.
| izacus wrote:
| Electron comes with a lot of security exceptions and an
| insanely large security issue surface. You're essentially
| running an old unpatched version of Chrome for every
| Electron app you're using.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Electron comes with a lot of security exceptions
|
| I _promise_ you that the reason Razer is asking for
| network access isn 't because they forgot to turn it off.
|
| They could be writing this driver in Rust and they would
| still be asking for these exceptions. Nobody accidentally
| builds a driver whose sole purpose is to download and
| install another driver from a remote source.
| ploxiln wrote:
| I think HP home inkjet printers were the first to do this,
| over 10 years ago. Somehow any way of finding and installing
| a driver on windows would pull in a 500MB suite of always-
| running junk before the actual driver. No electron back then.
| (I'm still a bit of an electron hater though :)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > with a lot of unneeded code
|
| I've read this as "uuencoded" first :-) Imagined sort of like
| trojans obfuscate their code with Base64 but using a more weird
| encoding this time :-)
|
| > and then additional actual driver download.
|
| I bet you can just steal the driver form the temp dir or from
| the actual system after it installs and save for future usage.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Electron is like 80MB, uncompressed. That isn't really the
| issue here anyway.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| ...Logitech?
| sundvor wrote:
| Logitech software might be bloated, but it's downright lean
| compared to the Roccat mouse I just got for my son.
| izacus wrote:
| Both Roccat and Logitech are horrible in this regard. I
| skipped a thought mostly because I had to deal with Logitech
| crap the latest.
| williamtwild wrote:
| "like most HackerNews developers"
|
| What are you babbling on about?
| chapium wrote:
| Seriously, I would have assumed Rust, Elm, Julia, D, or Zig
| if that were the case.
| K5EiS wrote:
| The driver is from Roccat, not Logitech.
| wayneftw wrote:
| > ...by using Electron for their driver.
|
| Except they didn't use Electron for the driver. They used it
| for the management UI.
|
| > I'm sure that allowed them to iterate quickly, hire
| developers who know nothing but JS to build their driver
| package and ship the MVP with low costs!
|
| Pffft. Imagine thinking that people who choose Electron only
| know JS. Clearly that's incorrect as many companies choose
| Electron despite employing a multitude of native programmers.
| I'm one of them.
|
| Personally, I know C, C++, C#, Go, JavaScript, Python,
| TypeScript, SQL, Swift and Visual Basic...and I'll choose
| Electron to build GUIs every time. I also use React Native to
| build mobile apps. Pure native kits all suck compared to
| Electron or React Native and on top of their pure suckage
| you'll have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of each platform
| you deploy to.
|
| I don't just build them either. _I run multiple instances of
| about 4-5 different Electron apps all day long without issue on
| an i7-4770, a CPU that was released in 2013, inside of an old
| refurbished machine from like 2014 or 2015._ And that 's under
| XFCE most of the day...but when do I go use my Mac or Windows
| machines I get the same exact experience from those apps thanks
| to Electron.
|
| But oh no! 300mb!! Unneeded code on my precious hard drive!
|
| Maybe stop whining and get a bigger hard drive if you can't
| handle 300mb. And I doubt you've actually looked into many of
| the native desktop apps that you're running to investigate how
| much of the code is actually necessary. Let's hear some of the
| great native apps that you run.
|
| What kind of work do you? I really want to hear about the 100%
| efficient native-only apps.
| voldacar wrote:
| People like you are ruining the desktop computing experience.
| just stop
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| CATIA.
|
| >But oh no! 300mb!! Unneeded code on my precious hard drive!
|
| If somebody from the "Hit a programer, they will know why did
| they got it" group lurking here, please consider the comment
| of wayneftw as a call for a dance.
| duped wrote:
| I doubt the driver is actually written in JS (I don't think
| that's possible on Windows, Linux, or MacOS). As a client to
| help configure the driver setup and manage its updates in a
| consistent way across platforms... is it really that bad?
| skoskie wrote:
| I use Logitech's software on three macs, and my honest
| evaluation is that it gets the job done, but just barely.
|
| Key cons: - Yes, it asks for a firewall rule, which I simply
| deny with no negative consequences. Still, it's concerning
| that it even tries.
|
| - In order to save or backup your settings, you must create a
| Logitech account, and those settings will be saved on their
| servers. I would really just like a config file I can sync
| myself.
|
| - The frequency with which the software needs updates is
| baffling. On one hand it's nice to get such support years
| after the purchase. On the other.. what the hell needs
| updating on a mouse?
|
| - The software UI sucks. And there's no excuse for that given
| it's just JS.
|
| - Somehow, after reboot Logitech's drivers are one of the
| last things to load. So you have to wait over a minute, and
| sometimes much longer, for you mouse to be able to handle
| your inputs correctly, which is really frustrating.
|
| Key Pros:
|
| - The software does work. You don't actually open the config
| UI very often, so it's not like you're constantly running an
| electron app in the background.
|
| - Let's face it, the hardware is good enough to overcome the
| bad software.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > The frequency with which the software needs updates is
| baffling. On one hand it's nice to get such support years
| after the purchase. On the other.. what the hell needs
| updating on a mouse?
|
| I'm pretty sure it requests an update anytime any Logitech
| product gets an update, even one you don't own or have
| installed. A recent G-Hub update where the release notes
| only mention mice I don't own broke the battery detection
| on my wireless headset. Now it always says I'm at 2%
| battery. (Why did I even update?)
| skoskie wrote:
| That's really good point I hadn't considered. I'll bet
| you're right.
| Macha wrote:
| Did you see Logitech's previous native apps? Did you think they
| were better?
|
| Because they really weren't. Hardware companies fail at
| software is a much longer living phenomenon than Electron.
|
| (I could believe Logitech's current apps are an Electron like
| technology, but timeframe wise they predate it also, so maybe
| more like nw.js or similar, this article talks about roccat,
| which is a different company)
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Isn't that the type of software that keeps being defended
| here? ^^
|
| No? I've basically never seen that and I see endless posts like
| yours.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > No? I've basically never seen that and I see endless posts
| like yours.
|
| HN is definitely swarming both proponents and opponents for
| Electron. While I can understand the appeal of Electron, I'm
| no way in favor of it.
| criddell wrote:
| I think it's because the audience here has both creators
| and consumers.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I'm both - I fucking love electron.
|
| Do I like the 300mb download? No
|
| Do I like the development language? No
|
| Do I like the apps built with it? Depends entirely on the
| app.
|
| Do I FUCKING LOVE BEYOND BELIEF that it means linux
| support is native and present at first release? You bet
| your ass I do.
| staticassertion wrote:
| no please dont turn this into a "why i like/dislike
| electron" thread
|
| edit: ah, too late
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> Do I FUCKING LOVE BEYOND BELIEF that it means linux
| support is native and present at first release? You bet
| your ass I do. _
|
| Ironically, this thread is exactly about a Logitech app
| that doesn't have this.
| criddell wrote:
| Ultimately, I don't think that's great for Linux on the
| desktop. Nobody wants to use a platform where everything
| is giant battery, memory, and CPU hog.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| No one cares one whit about the battery/memory/CPU
| requirements of software they can't run in the first
| place.
|
| And at least in my experience, spinning up a VM to run
| windows only software is a bigger battery/memory/cpu hit
| than running electron.
|
| ---
|
| I would love it if Electron was better on those fronts
| (not to mention a few others) but it's _good enough_ for
| most of my current use cases.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| Yes, it is _good enough_ , this is exactly why we still
| live in the 60's (see linux), this is why we still use
| windows, this is why there is no seamless GUI on nixes,
| this is why we still use terminals and users, this is why
| intelligent, and great operating systems got messacred,
| this is why there are only mediocre people in the IT, and
| this is why we can't have nice things.
|
| But thanks for continuing the loop.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I think your entitlement is leaking. You might want to
| have it checked.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| Are you mad because you are also a mediocre programer?
| You can change that through learning.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| Stop being passive-aggressive and explain what you wanted
| to say, maybe you will notice you are wrong.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| And if they do, there's already ChromeOS. Why use an
| inferior slapped-together distro for that?
| inetknght wrote:
| > _electron_
|
| > _linux support is native_
|
| Whoever told you that Electron means native Linux is
| lying to you. It's as native to Linux as a web app is
| native to Windows or Mac; that is: it's just run in a
| glorified browser.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| A tab on a browser the user is already running would cost
| less memory and CPU.
|
| It's also with chrome super easy to open a page without
| the normal browser UI that looks like an app add a
| .desktop file and presto it's an app it would actually be
| superior in many respects.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _It 's also with chrome super easy to open a page
| without the normal browser UI that looks like an app_
|
| Yeah that's what Electron is.
|
| > _add a .desktop file and presto it 's an app_
|
| So Chrome has turned the .url into a .desktop and ruined
| what .desktop means. Neat.
|
| > _it would actually be superior in many respects_
|
| Few, not many. And those respects are garbage because
| it's a still a web app masquerading as something it's
| not.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| It's native as in supported directly by the company
| making the software.
|
| It's not some random 3rd party that's trying to implement
| a buggy client or wrapper. At risk of being shut down at
| any moment, and probably violating the company's terms of
| use. (which is a whole different conversation around the
| sad reality of interoperable software today)
|
| ---
|
| It's native in the sense that I, as a developer employed
| by a company using it, can easily drop in a linux release
| without having to have a long drawn out cost/benefits
| analysis trying to convince PMs that we should do it,
| because it's not months or years of additional work -
| it's some manifest file tweaks to get icons in, and
| possibly some additional signing scripts to be run during
| the final packaging.
|
| ---
|
| It's not _native_ in the sense that it directly uses OS
| specific APIs, but who gives a flying fuck? Seriously.
|
| I spend 95% of my time in a browser or a text editor
| already - "Browser with better system access" is just
| fine to me.
|
| It turns out RAM and disk space are really, REALLY,
| _REALLY_ fucking cheap. as in - I can get 32gbs of ram
| for less than the cost of a windows license. So I 'll
| take my linux support, thank you very much. (shocker - I
| also like mobile web apps, and strongly favor mobile
| moving that direction as well - For _exactly_ the same
| reasons).
| criddell wrote:
| > It's native as in supported directly by the company
| making the software.
|
| Except for the times when that isn't true. Elsewhere in
| this thread people are complaining about how the Logitech
| software is Electron based but doesn't work on Linux.
|
| > It turns out RAM and disk space are really, REALLY,
| REALLY fucking cheap.
|
| RAM and disk may be cheap and plentiful, but battery
| power and bandwidth are not. It's why web apps don't make
| much sense for mobile today.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Web apps are the default access mechanism for basically
| everything I do on my phone. And by that, I mean - I open
| chrome/firefox and navigate to the site I'd like to use.
|
| I have less than 5 installed apps that I use on my phone
| directly, and those are almost all exclusively apps that
| need direct hardware access - Camera - Phone - Maps
|
| I also happen to use a few apps to work around sites that
| are genuinely _awful_ to their mobile users (reddit, for
| example, is a black whole of dark ux patterns if you open
| it in a browser without faking your user agent - So I run
| bacon reader which [ironically] is just another webview
| running on the device anyways)
| bayindirh wrote:
| Just because web apps are fitting to your current
| workflows and apps you use, it won't fit everybody else.
|
| I'm just the opposite of you. Just using web to reach HN,
| and Google, nothing else. Everything I use is native, and
| I'm happy with all the native apps I have.
|
| Hardware is cheap, network is reliable notion is just an
| illusion. No resource is cheap and nothing is reliable.
| I'm in a remote location with 4G network access and,
| while it's not slow, it's unreliable and choppy as hell
| (with full bar / excellent reception). Even well-baked
| and battle tested algorithms and applications (e.g. Zoom,
| Skype and other similar covid-19 critical, realtime
| software) choke, shudder and fail with smallest network
| congestion.
|
| Also, while RAM is _relatively cheap_ , processing power
| is not. Just because you have fast flash and plentiful
| RAM on the device, it doesn't mean all is yours. You
| can't just assume to use all of that.
|
| If that software is running on a resource contained
| system, It'd be probably confined in a cgroup, and it'd
| be killed or crashed with OOM exceptions constantly
| because of this assumption.
|
| At the end of the day, Electron is useful for some stuff,
| however it's not native in any means. If it was literally
| native, Evernote for Linux would've been released by now.
| Tiddly Desktop wouldn't have some silly fullscreen bugs.
| Spotify Linux wouldn't be a volunteer project inside
| Spotify. A simple application wouldn't consume as much
| memory as a full blown IDE with gazillion plugins enabled
| and written in Java. Visual Studio Code wouldn't need
| plugin subsets or "Hey, group the plugins you use by
| language, otherwise memory usage becomes unwieldy"
| warning. I can go on and on and on.
|
| We have alternatives. We have Qt, GTK, Python compiled
| with Cython (if you need binary code), heck even Lazarus
| and WX widgets, and Java. It's unbelievable that JVM is
| lighter than Electron with all bells, whistles and
| Hotspot and whatnot. Some of these technologies can adapt
| themselves to the hardware resource limits of the system
| they're running on, transparently, with negligible
| performance impact most of the time.
|
| So, you can tell that Electron is a better RAD tool than
| Java, but it's nowhere the only feasible tool to enable
| native cross-platform applications. Electron is lazy.
| It's the perfect manifestation of MVP meets mock-ups with
| enough features baked in to allow rapid-fire releases.
|
| I agree that 640K is not enough for everybody, but no
| resource is as abundant as hydrogen in the universe.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| _native_ is probably an exxageration.
|
| But it means (in theory) the same experience on all
| plattforms.
|
| And in my opinion, a working linux electron app beats a
| buggy wine ported version by far.
|
| Because this is usually the choice. The linux market is
| way too small and unwilling to spend much money, than to
| justify a common software developer to spend the effort
| of porting.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _But it means (in theory) the same experience on all
| plattforms._
|
| That's quite the opposite of native since each platform
| has a host of unique features and capabilities.
| Guaranteeing the same experience on all platforms is
| guaranteeing that you're not using the platforms
| _natively_.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| _Same_ experience on all platforms. Sure. Nowhere does
| that imply "a good experience on any one of those
| platforms"...I am reminded of early (1.4) Java, just an
| order of magnitude worse.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| >The linux market is way too small Maybe just amybe
| having 6*10^23 distributions wasn't that great idea.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| >unwilling to spend much money
|
| Citation needed.
|
| I think for years humble indie bundle kept statistics and
| linux supporters were always chipping in well above
| average.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Because this is usually the choice.
|
| Interesting. I don't seem to be lacking software to do
| everything I want to do in Linux without having to use
| Wine.
|
| Also, I've spent more money buying Linux software than
| any other platform.
| FpUser wrote:
| I have zero troubles shipping Windows and Linux user end
| GUI made in Lazarus. Single tiny exe. Does not gobble up
| RAM either.
| brushfoot wrote:
| What is package management like with Lazarus? Are there
| third-party/community-contributed packages?
| amelius wrote:
| C++ with Qt also seems like a good choice, although it is
| not free for most types of commercial use.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Lazarus is pretty good, I've used it a few times myself
| to make quick one-off static executables with GUIs. I
| don't use it for anything serious though because, well,
| Pascal just isn't a language I want to spend a lot of
| time working in.
|
| I wish there was something like Lazarus, but somehow more
| language agnostic.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Pascal just isn't a language I want to spend a lot of
| time working in."
|
| I do not dwell on "liking/disliking" languages. I use
| what I use (few languages) for pure practical reasons. To
| me the goal is to design and deliver end product.
| Language to me is like a screwdriver. It just has to be
| good enough to do the job without bending backwards. For
| making native multiplatform GUI applications
| Lazarus/Freepascal combo totally ticks the box.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That's fair and also generally how I look at things, but
| it does mean having to become familiar with yet-another-
| language that has its own quirks and models and whatnot
| and, in FPC's case, a complete lack of inline variable
| declaration.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Maybe try electron with WASM? :D
|
| (Full disclosure - I don't really recommend this, it's
| not ready yet, imo)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| If you think electron is anything at all like Lazarus,
| you must never have used Lazarus.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean, it's an event based form builder. Same as almost
| all of these tools (going WAAAAY back, 20+ years at
| least).
|
| I have not used Lazarus for any serious project, so if
| there's something particularly novel that you enjoy about
| it, I'd love to learn!
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I mean, it's an event based form builder. Same as
| almost all of these tools (going WAAAAY back, 20+ years
| at least)."
|
| And nothing "better" and more practical came out ever
| since paradigm wise. Just insane bloat of trying to marry
| Browser to a native application
| Spivak wrote:
| I think the reality is that it's insane bloat trying to
| give browsers access to native libs. If I could just
| download and install apps in the browser that weren't
| sandboxed (don't @ me about PWA's they're not even close)
| then I think we might actually achieve Java's dream.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I think we might actually achieve Java's dream"
|
| Keep waiting for a miracle. Meanwhile native applications
| solve problem with ease. Sure some applications are
| totally make sense as browser based but you can't just
| color everything the same. This dream will never
| materialize for way too many reasons, including political
| ones.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| > And nothing "better" and more practical came out ever
| since paradigm wise.
|
| I think this is a pretty poor take on the problem. If
| that were really the case we'd all be using winforms 3.1
| (or whatever the original version number was...).
|
| Here's the "Better" that a browser does
|
| - It's got standards and open documentation describing
| most behavior
|
| - It's got _incredibly_ robust networking code.
|
| - It's got an insanely flexible markup language for
| describing both what form elements are present, but also
| how they're visually displayed. (Show me how to do
| animations in Lazarus... last I looked it was _all_
| manual) NOTE: Not only is it insanely flexible, it also
| is well documented and described by standards.
|
| - It avoided the trap of being GUI first at development
| time, encouraging an eco-system of tools that generate
| and modify the text based definition of the GUI you're
| going to present to users
|
| - It has good separation of concerns. My form elements
| can be styled completely differently by just swapping out
| a style sheet.
|
| - It has good (although often underused) A11y support.
| For most disabilities that you can think of.
|
| - It has first class debugging tools available,
| supporting a wide variety of environments.
|
| ----
|
| That's what the browser brings. Is it heavy? Sure. Is it
| bloat? Not really.... depends a lot on your use case.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Do I FUCKING LOVE BEYOND BELIEF that it means linux
| support is native and present at first release?
|
| Not me.
|
| From my point of view, if the Linux version is Electron-
| based, then there is no Linux version.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make
| here.
|
| If the linux version is Electron-based, _ALL_ versions
| will be electron based. That 's the whole point.
|
| If you'd rather not use electron based software, more
| power to ya - that's your choice. But lets admit that's a
| luxury that some of us don't have - I'm a hell of a lot
| happier spinning up slack as an electron app rather than
| having to run it in a vm, I promise you that much.
| Spivak wrote:
| I won't knock you for that opinion but I can use VS Code,
| Spotify, Bitwarden, Discord, Teams, Notion, GH Desktop
| where not 10 years ago I would have been stuck with
| either the crippled web versions, running them in a
| Windows VM, or booting into my Windows partition.
|
| It's fine to hate the tech and wish that someone would
| come along and make something better but the tools that
| everyone big and small is using to build apps is cross-
| platform by default and that's a huge huge huge win for
| users.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Isn't this the problem Java was trying to solve? Why did
| that go out of fashion?
| recursive wrote:
| Java applets were one of the first and most visible ways
| that this was attempted. The user experience of applets
| was atrocious. Starting up the applet runtime browser
| plugin at the time would cause the whole system to
| stutter and stall for several seconds. I'm not sure if it
| was the single core architecture of the time, but I
| recall that the entire system would lock up while this
| was happening. I think that this single fact caused a lot
| of damage to the reputation of java in the general
| public.
| criddell wrote:
| It did go out of fashion and I'm not sure why that is. I
| do have some ideas and opinions...
|
| AFAIK, JetBrains builds all of their excellent IDEs with
| Java + Swing. Old school for sure, but it works great. If
| I were building something new today, I would definitely
| consider Java on both the client and server sides.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| ... does it mean I won't run your software? You bet your
| ass it does.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean... great?
|
| If the determining factor for whether my product was
| useful to you is what rendering engine it uses, you were
| not and will not ever be the target user anyways.
|
| I don't make "social" apps, I'm not in the business of
| collecting users for the hell of it. Either I provide
| business value or I don't, and Electron has very little
| to do with the business value my customers get (although
| it certainly does accelerate new feature releases, and
| most of my customers like that).
| moonchrome wrote:
| The people I see complaining about Electron sound like they
| never did commercial frontend, and usually bring up stuff
| like Visual Basic making me think they haven't done frontend
| in 20 years or done anything non-trivial with GUI (if you
| actually used VB to build serious apps you'd know where the
| codebehind and using threads to avoid blocking the UI leads
| you).
|
| Just a very loud minority. I don't particularly like Electron
| but compared to the alternatives it's the best choice for a
| lot of apps (as demonstrated by the success of many apps
| using it, despite "performance is the most important feature"
| crowd).
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| So because even senior programers can't do parallel-
| programming and handle threads then just simply use a
| webbrowser everywhere? Why don't you and the other
| programers sitting back into the school-bench and learn it?
| You know, it would make you more valuable at your company.
| But yeah, i understand, programers actually hate and not
| capable to learn something new, this is why linux exists.
| rplnt wrote:
| I see both, all the time (where relevant). I understand the
| hate, so I tend to forget it. Justifying the horrible user
| experience for cost or "without electron the app wouldn't
| exits" is something I don't agree with and as such it sticks
| out more. You might be in the other camp and just have
| different perception.
| caslon wrote:
| > Let's get these out of the way:
|
| > 1. Yes, we're building on Electron. Yes, we are aware of
| the performance tradeoffs, but have decided this is the best
| choice for us. We're shipping Windows, Mac and Linux clients
| along with browsers with a four-person team -- it's the only
| good way right now to do that without features taking six
| months. We've modified the screen sharing pipeline in
| Chromium to reduce latency as much as possible, because with
| interactive screen sharing, milliseconds matter.
|
| Literally a massively popular post from this week, and all of
| their comments within are "Well yes, but theoretically VS
| Code got it to slightly over a hundred megabytes when idle so
| naturally Electron's perfect."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223515
| nosianu wrote:
| So you found someone who had a perfectly reasonable
| explanation for his choice of tools. We started with
| drivers and now you come with a desktop app example?
|
| Now find not just one (anecdote) but a trend in HN comments
| that this tool is recommended to be used when it is clearly
| the wrong tool for the job?
| nottorp wrote:
| > So you found someone who had a perfectly reasonable
| explanation for his choice of tools.
|
| Really depends on your definition of "reasonable". I
| could invoke Goodwin's law :)
| clownpenis_fart wrote:
| a reasonable explanation would have been "it was the best
| choice for our end users", not "it was the best choice
| for us"
| Closi wrote:
| A reasonable explanation can, of course, be either of
| those things.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Can't ship code that doesn't exist.
| nvr219 wrote:
| Whoa that's deep.
| JohnFen wrote:
| From my point of view, if the code being shipped performs
| badly, then it may as well not exist.
| gpm wrote:
| A driver and a screen sharing/video calling application
| have vastly different constraints, and what makes sense for
| one doesn't make sense for the other...
| detaro wrote:
| I can just as well point at that thread and go "Isn't that
| the type of software HN keeps criticizing for being
| Electron?". Somehow people see discussions about A vs B and
| go "HN is totally always for A", despite the only reason
| you even see A so much is that it's hotly discussed every
| single time, with plenty people arguing B. And of course
| that shitty generalization is now top of the thread,
| instead of something discussing any substance specific to
| the submission.
| da_chicken wrote:
| The perception is that the pro-Electron group is made up
| of all the people writing the software being discussed
| and therefore getting most of the benefits of their
| choice, while the anti-Electron group is made up of all
| the people criticizing it for having to put up with all
| the drawbacks for the end-user (and setting aside the
| fact that the software may not exist at all if not for
| those pro-Electron benefits).
|
| However, since lots of software is still being written in
| Electron and... essentially _none_ of the criticisms and
| drawbacks of doing so have been addressed, the anti-
| Electron group feels like they 're being ignored. Because
| they are. So when they make posts about feeling ignored
| or complaining about having to repeat the same criticisms
| over and over without any improvement, that's because
| that's what's happening.
|
| The anti-Electron people are not saying that nobody
| agrees with them. They're complaining that their
| arguments are clearly falling on deaf ears.
| acomjean wrote:
| I suspect there is hope from the electron developers that
| somehow the platform will start getting less resource
| intensive.
|
| App developers want their user to have a good experience
| (I'm guessing). But it isn't great with electron. But its
| fund one team or fund 3 ui teams (Windows, Mac, Linux)
| and hope testing gets them all in sync.
|
| Unfortunately there isn't a great cross-platform solution
| (qt?) that makes everyone happy (or at least not
| furious).
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| >essentially none of the criticisms and drawbacks of
| doing so have been addressed, the anti-Electron group
| feels like they're being ignored
|
| I was told there is a "Hit a programer, they will know
| why did they got it" group and they basically waiting for
| the employes at the HQs, following them to the parking
| lots / train stations and beating the living sht out of
| them, just because their profession is programer.
|
| Maybe if this gets mainstream we will see change in the
| future.
| detaro wrote:
| You also see non-devs saying Electron is fine, and if the
| complaints were considered is not something you can
| really tell. Few people deciding against Electron are
| going to loudly broadcast that "we were thinking about
| Electron", and if you consider it and decide it's worth
| it for you despite downsides, well, you are the "bad
| guy"(TM) anyways.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Can you find pro-Electron comments? Sure, but if you
| browse any post about Electron you'll see a lot of
| "Electron is a disrespect to your users!" comments, whose
| top reply is "Yes, and also...(more complaints)", whose
| top reply is "Electron is the worst in a long line of..."
|
| This kind of "reply-to-agree-and-pile-on" chain happens
| on HN a lot, but there are certain topics that really set
| it off, and Electron is definitely one. The commenters
| are commenting, the readers are upvoting, and what we end
| up with is an atmosphere where one side of the
| conversation is clearly getting more engagement.
| [deleted]
| staticassertion wrote:
| They literally put "why we use electron" as their first
| point clearly in defense of the expected onslaught of HNers
| who were going to attack them for it.
|
| > and all of their comments within
|
| A majority of the following posts (with regards to
| Electron) are negative...
|
| > ust promise yourself you'll eventually quit Electron.
| Electron is nothing more than a deal you make with the
| devil,
|
| > Don't just tinker... make it a grand North Star goal to
| lose Electron, and make performance your moat.
|
| > It being Electron especially explains why it's so much
| more resource intensive than the other solutions.
|
| > I hope you'll reconsider as your team grows.
|
| > For me personally, memory usage has been a big concern
| with the growing number of Electron apps
|
| > Indeed - a key competitor, Tuple, does not use Electron,
| and as a result I won't even be taking a second look at
| Pop.
|
| It's interesting that people on HN seem to be in such an
| obvious echo chamber but also see themselves as outsiders.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| There are thousands and thousands of people on HackerNews
| and only a tiny fraction of people comment on any given
| post. Further, the group that does comment on a
| particular post isn't a random sample.
|
| Under such conditions, expecting a consistent, well
| thought out, position from post to post is unrealistic.
| And not really even all that surprising.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I don't get your point. To reiterate, I'm challenging the
| idea that on HN you're likely to find stronger support
| for electron vs against.
| infogulch wrote:
| GP is challenging the idea that "HN" is a single cohort
| with a consistent monolithic viewpoint on anything.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I see. I explicitly specified that I was referring to
| comments I see.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that when people say something
| like "HN says" or "HN thinks", they are asserting that a
| large majority of the comments take a particular side of
| an issue. Sure, there are many readers who don't comment,
| but if they think very differently from the commenters,
| then they should speak up, because otherwise they don't
| really count as part of the conversation.
| greesil wrote:
| These two things are not mutually exclusive.
| burnished wrote:
| I have to agree with a sibling commenter, you've weakened
| your case by jumping from a driver to a desktop
| application. If we follow what I think your implicit
| reasoning here is, then we need to just throw Electron in
| the dumpster because there can be no good time to use it/no
| sufficient defense.
| jmkni wrote:
| Brutal lol
| pier25 wrote:
| You don't need to install anything from Logitech to use most of
| their products.
| kodah wrote:
| Just to address your Electron mini-rant:
|
| I've been _trying_ to build a desktop application for the
| entire pandemic. In my professional work I work on
| infrastructure products (think software engineering, not DevOps
| or SRE). My skills are not really outfit for frontend
| development _or_ desktop development. Shocking stuff, my
| ineptitude, I know ( /sarcasm)
|
| I ended up learning some JS and I wrote a desktop app with the
| help of a package called Wails for Go. It's electron-like in
| many ways, but lets me code up a "backend" in go while JS is
| resigned to doing things it's good at, like UI. Eventually,
| though, I struck the gold mine. I actually made a native
| desktop app in Go with an immediate mode package. It looked
| like shit, but it worked. I then went on to design a command
| line variant as well.
|
| My chief takeaway after doing all of them: even my native code
| resembled the patterns found in JavaScript based UI
| developments. This basically implies "ELM is everywhere" to
| some degree, even in Frontends that don't explicitly say it.
| QT's QML is JavaScript that's pre-compiled for desktop. Sciter
| is the same way. You can gripe about electrons size,
| computational, and memory efficiency, but the opposite (native
| programming for UI) requires an order of magnitude of very
| niche programming that will only be useful _for this purpose_ ,
| of which any cool thing (like syntax highlighting) that you
| might want to do will need to be done for the first time. Just
| a quick reminder, again, I'm not really a fan of or regular
| user of JavaScript or TypeScript.
|
| What I'm saying is, there are tradeoffs to be made. I don't
| blame a bunch of startups investing in a JavaScript desktop app
| when you can absolutely produce a stable cash cow with minimal
| skillset change and leave a handful of teams building
| independent threads and daemons that JavaScript can pass work
| off to that it can't do.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| >My skills are not really outfit for frontend development or
| desktop development.
|
| Then you should simply not do that. This is the reason why we
| have so many unusable and ugly program with wild UI. Make you
| a favor: next time pay for a proper developer, you don't have
| to do everything yourself.
| ploxiln wrote:
| > My chief takeaway after doing all of them: even my native
| code resembled the patterns found in JavaScript based UI
| developments.
|
| > (native programming for UI) requires an order of magnitude
| of very niche programming that will only be useful for this
| purpose
|
| that seems contradictory
| kodah wrote:
| The broader patterns are repeatable, somewhat, in that you
| can see them broad as day. The way these different
| languages handle state and communication is totally
| different though, so, simultaneously incredibly niche as
| well.
| falcolas wrote:
| Logitech is absolutely as bad, or worse than Roccat here. I
| have no legitimate way to get mac drivers for my mice, because
| they aren't on Logitech's website anymore. And thanks to mac
| bs, they don't work out of the box.
| somewhatbetter wrote:
| You should stop buying non-standard compilant hardware then.
| tumblewit wrote:
| This reminds me of Windows 10 itself. A fresh install of windows
| 10 has all its builtin apps including the calculator (for
| currency I am guessing) allowed through the firewall by default.
| In the security world, the default should be off and only upon
| request should an app allowed to talk over the network. Not to
| mention the fact that apps like Facebook messenger are installed
| by default in Windows. Microsoft can sell me their operating
| system in a minute if they just stop all the stupid telemetry,
| remove the bloat and by default turn all privacy and security
| options to on and not off. It's not a bad operating system for
| most people, it's just a privacy nightmare that Microsoft seems
| to be fine with somehow. Because no matter what your privacy
| 'policy' is, the best policy is to not collect any data at all.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Microsoft can sell me their operating system in a minute if
| they just stop all the stupid telemetry, remove the bloat and
| by default turn all privacy and security options to on and not
| off
|
| I don't think Microsoft is in the business of selling desktop
| OSs anymore, despite the fact that they still charge money for
| them. All of their behavior suggests complete disdain for the
| desktop and users of the desktop. I think Windows is only still
| being developed because it is a delivery platform for ads and
| telemetry. For the moment I'll still take it over the
| alternatives, but I'm confident Microsoft will eventually push
| me over the edge.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Like the battered wife staying because "I can still stand
| it."
| [deleted]
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I'm curious if you think statements like this really help
| paint the Linux Desktop community in a good light. Because
| honestly as much as I don't like a lot of things about how
| Linux Desktop works the community is also a significant
| factor in driving me away.
| worik wrote:
| True
|
| Filing bug reports is a exercise in getting abused.
|
| I installed a clean install on a Raspberry PI, installed
| emcas (which I have used for about thirty years), and
| found a utility did not work (I will conceal the guilty -
| it is a common story)
|
| I filed a bug report, and was abused because I was using
| a emacs distribution that was three years old - how could
| I possibly think that any problems I saw be anything but
| my fault , and didn't I have better things to do than
| waste their time with my idiot ramblings.
|
| What sort of silly child acts like that? What a crock!
|
| Some parts of the Free Software community are much
| better. (Rust, for example, nothing but respect for my
| idiot ramblings). But some parts are still full of the
| "bigger dick" egomaniacs....
| ncmncm wrote:
| Who "acts like that"? Maybe somebody unpaid and abused
| over a bug maybe already fixed, years ago.
|
| What "silly child" abuses unpaid maintainers? Oh, right,
| you.
| ncmncm wrote:
| _I_ don 't mind if you feel like you have been driven
| away. Your feelings are your business. Complaining about
| your feelings is pointless and rude.
|
| It is nobody's responsibility to make you happy.
| Imagining otherwise is just a formula for remaining
| unhappy. Blaming others for it will not improve anybody's
| life, including your own.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| The Linux community is incredibly diverse, some are nice
| and helpful, some are assholes, some just want to be left
| alone to do their work.
|
| Generalizing the whole community from reading some forum
| posts is pretty unfair.
| passivate wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. MS has enabled our company to
| save tens of thousands of dollars because of their
| unwillingness to compromise on backwards compat. Literally we
| take CD's burned a decade(s) ago and the software installs
| and functions just fine. In our field, software tends to cost
| five digits and upwards so its a big F* deal. I can't imagine
| any other vendor coming even close. I don't particularly care
| for their other products, but Windows has earned a ton of
| respect from me.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yeah, that's one of the reasons I still choose Windows over
| the other desktop OSs. PowerShell is also great. The
| problem is that they take this great base and plaster a
| slow, dysfunctional, half-thought-out, user-hostile
| interface on top of it stuffed with telemetry, ads, and
| dark patterns designed to push you to their cloud services.
| passivate wrote:
| Agreed, No argument there.
| Silhouette wrote:
| The question as always is what you could replace it with. We
| have an unfortunate situation where Microsoft had a near-
| monopoly on the desktop for so long that credible
| alternatives are lacking for many users. Even if they like
| some particular flavour of Apple or *nix as an OS, the
| applications they need might not be available on that
| platform. I wonder what the forever-defenders of Windows
| think they will do if Microsoft continues along the course
| set by Nadella and the current senior team and the situation
| with intrusions and lack of control over your own equipment
| continues to deteriorate.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Honestly I'm probably just going to stop using computers so
| much if that happens. Linux Desktop has consistently proven
| that it has no interest in doing anything in a sane or
| consistent manner, and Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in
| terms of fucking shit up for no reason, only in different
| ways.
|
| If we're very very lucky, something like Haiku will gain a
| hypervisor, WINE port, and graphical acceleration, then
| take off in popularity and become the last refuge of the
| desktop. I'm pretty skeptical it'll go down like that
| though.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Who do you imagine this "Linux Desktop" is, that you
| attribute lack of interest to?
|
| Various groups make desktop environments that may be used
| on Linux, as diverse as KDE, Gnome, Chrome, and Android.
| It could possibly make sense to complain about one or
| other of them, or even several. As it is your complaint
| is entirely nonsensical, a category error like saying red
| is too hot.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Who do you imagine this "Linux Desktop" is
|
| The community of people who make and distribute Linux
| distributions and software intended for the Desktop use
| case, when taken as a whole.
|
| > Various groups make desktop environments that may be
| used on Linux, as diverse as KDE, Gnome, Chrome, and
| Android.
|
| Calling Android or ChromeOS a Linux Desktop is incredibly
| disingenuous.
|
| > It could possibly make sense to complain about one or
| other of them, or even several.
|
| Every distribution has the same problems because they are
| all built with more or less the same hodgepodges of
| desperately developed software.
| evilduck wrote:
| > Every distribution has the same problems because they
| are all built with more or less the same hodgepodges of
| desperately developed software.
|
| In other words, slightly better than trying to change
| system settings in Windows 10?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Honestly I'm probably just going to stop using
| computers so much if that happens.
|
| The state of mobile software (including the OS) has
| become so awful that I've already decided to stop using a
| smartphone entirely.
| keyb0ardninja wrote:
| > Linux Desktop has consistently proven that it has no
| interest in doing anything in a sane or consistent manner
|
| Could you explain that a bit more?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yes, but I won't because I find that posts like yours are
| only interested in performative argumentation for the
| sake of convincing some nebulous group of "future
| readers" that Linux Desktop is worth considering.
|
| I'll save you the trouble: Dear readers, Linux Desktop is
| fine if you like the way it works. I encourage using
| tools you like. If you haven't tried it, it might work
| for you.
|
| I don't like the way works, I've expounded upon the
| details many times, and I'm not interested in further
| performative argumentation on the subject.
| tumblewit wrote:
| With ARM, the lack of control might deteriorate even
| further. While the underlying architecture might not have
| much to do with it, the accelerators in these SOCs just
| give more options for Microsoft to collect data and lock
| down devices even further.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Not to mention Candy Crush
| cptskippy wrote:
| That was a icon that initiated an install of the App from the
| App Store.
| jfgfdg77a wrote:
| Kind of, however it was/is a bit more persistent than that,
| when you removed the icon trace (from menu and possbily
| add/remove), it would still re-instate itself on the next
| major windows update. It was kind of like the tellytubbies
| windows xp theme coming back every couple of weeks
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _> In the security world, the default should be off and only
| upon request should an app allowed to talk over the network._
|
| I'd argue that _reasonable_ defaults are better. Asking
| permission for everything, including features most to all
| people would find necessary, just creates decision fatigue and
| results in people clicking "allow" on every popup.
| adamc wrote:
| "Decision fatigue" is an apt phrase. Reminds me of Joel
| Spolsky's old essay on classic Windows help asking what kind
| of help db install I wanted ("compact", etc.) -- to which no
| normal user ever had an answer.
|
| Don't ask people questions that they are going to answer one
| way 95% or more of the time, or for which they haven't the
| context to answer. Just make it easy to change later if you
| need to.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Maybe something in the middle. One time, during initial
| setup, the OS should have a single question with all of the
| reasonable defaults displayed (and uncheckable). Tell people
| why these are reasonable, give them an opportunity to opt-
| out, make it easy to move forward quickly.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I agree and I think mobile got that part of sandboxing wrong.
| I think a better solution is to sandbox by default, give the
| application _no way_ of being able to tell if it has
| permissions or not, and making the user manually go in and
| grant it permissions as they find they actually need them.
| This would incentivise application developers to try and use
| as few permissions as they could possibly get away with.
|
| However, it would also require a really good, understandable
| interface for granting permissions to applications. Files are
| relatively straight forward, as the file open/save dialog can
| be handled by the OS and anything the user does with it can
| be considered explicit permission. For other resources
| something similar might work, or might need a completely
| different abstraction.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think the only reasonable default is to not talk unless
| I've given permission for it to do so.
|
| But I recognize that I'm in the minority. So much so that I
| can't trust software to behave itself, so I've had to use my
| firewall to disable all outbound traffic by default, so I can
| add exceptions as needed.
|
| It's amazing how rarely such exceptions are actually needed.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| I've never seen Facebook Messenger installed in Windows by
| default, having installed Windows 10 thousands of times. This
| sounds like it is included manufacturer bloatware.
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| Same here; I've installed emost variations of Win 10 (and all
| server editions, etc.) and seen lots of bloatware but never
| Facebook. Though I'm in the UK if that matters.
| kbenson wrote:
| Apparently they had a telemetry setting they added a while back
| which they called "security" which they renamed a year or so
| ago to "Diagnostic Data Off" to better encompass what it is:
|
| _The "Diagnostic Data Off" -- formerly Security -- should be
| exactly that, as Microsoft has long defined the option as "only
| the diagnostic data info that is required to keep Windows
| devices ... protected with the latest security updates." The
| company admits to some collecting -- OS, device ID, device
| class -- but the option waives all user content and data that
| might finger the user, including company name._[1]
|
| I think that option is only available in the Enterprise edition
| though, so if you want to pay them for it, it might be a bit
| pricey compared to other options, at ~$84/year (if you can even
| buy it for a single account, I have no idea).
|
| 1: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3532008/microsoft-
| elim...
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