Hacker News Reader

Comment by iotscale | Hacker News Reader

Well, I think I'll refrain from buying razer because of this: https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit/status/83665111681...

View on HN

Worth noting that you can use synapse (the driver software in question) in offline mode. Launching it during the s3 outage wasn't possible without manually editing the config XML file, but you can change to offline mode directly in synapse if their system isn't down.

Once you're in offline mode, you don't get cloud sync (nbd, honestly, except for when I get a new machine) and everything else works fine.

So synapse is online by default and has bad error detection (should just fall back to offline on timeout), but doesn't, strictly speaking, require cloud services to work. Not great design choices here, but not as bad as it sounds.

source: I am an owner of a razer mouse, couldn't configure it in windows on S3 day until I changed my config.

That's absolutely worth nothing if you already have a Razer mouse, but it's still a good reason to avoid Razer hardware. This is not the sign of a company that has their priorities straight.

My razer mouse has a twelve button thumbpad on the side of it. It sounds kind of ridiculous but it's an amazing piece of tech. I got it for gaming originally (and still use it for that), but it comes in handy in a lot of regular-work environments.

So I'd personally be happy if there were synapse drivers for linux, as I do work in linux and I'd love to be able to program macros and whatnot onto those buttons like I do when I'm booted into windows. It is a fairly handy piece of software, and I challenge you to find a better seventeen button mouse.

That doesn't apply to Linux...

It might not, but what it does do is show poor decision-making skills by teams at Razer.

This is for their razor blade laptop, are you really going to avoid their entire line up because of that?

This isn't even the laptop, it's for Razer Synapses which is their cloud mouse/keyboard settings program. This is literally nothing to do with their laptop line up.

it's the same brand, I think if they have the tendency to do this for their keyboard and mouse, who knows what they'll end up doing with their laptops.

If they can screw up a mouse that badly why should I trust them with my entire system?

This seems to be how the world of Windows works. Every peripheral I have seems to need an account to save your settings in the cloud, a feature I pretty much never care about. Every vendor wants you to know that yes, you're using their thing, and that they employ an entire team of engineers and designers that have never seen a computer before. I wish someone would put a stop to it.

This is why I had reservations about many high end mechanical keyboards that had all their macro/lighting/etc support done via software. Found out that Ducky makes keyboards that are 100% hardware configured, no OS even needed, just power. (Also IKBC keyboards do configuration via firmware too, I believe.)

As for my mouse, I had to use some Corsair junk to configure the button mappings, sensitivity, and turn down their ridiculous LED, but then it saved the settings to the mouse firmware so I can uninstall it and use it just fine on Linux. No more touching it again. Still not happy about it. Would rather it had been some tiny DIP switches underneath.

Yeah, I got on board the mechanical keyboard train before it was cool, and as a result my keyboard has no software that can configure it. There's a DIP switch to make caps lock into control. Perfect.

I have a Corsair mouse, and their software is spectacularly awful. (Their other software is also terrible; like configuring fan speed profiles for the water cooler.) No account required, but the button configuration is horrendously complex and in the end completely useless. I never figured out how to make a mouse button show up to Windows as an extra mouse button. Switched to a DeathAdder, and while their software is also terrible, at least the extra mouse buttons show up to the OS as mouse buttons. (Razer's software is terrible in a different way; the UI is overdesigned and I don't want to type in a username and secure password to change my fucking mouse settings... but once you're in there, the software does actually work well, letting you configure what you want in a relatively straightforward manner.)

All in all, this stuff is all super gimmicky. I want the marketing people to know I bought their product _in spite_ of the software they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing. I would be happier without it. The company would be more profitable without it. The mouse is for pointing at enemies and clicking when their head is under the crosshairs. I don't need a "brand experience". I don't need fancy colors or "game optimization". Just translate my hand motion to input events. I'll do the rest. Thanks.

I suspect the marketing department got too much say in this part of what they are offering. The drivers seem to be ok otherwise (I use a Naga Hex mouse and a Nostromo one hand keyboard).

They use Synapse for everything now, you can't use any of their peripherals or do anything to the local hardware (even on the blade) without their bullshit cloud service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com