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Comment by EastSmith | Hacker News Reader

Recently my son is using / installing lots of gaming peripherals and software for it and I have to say that I have not seen this much crapware bullshit since Windows XP (with no Service Pack).

If you want to setup the LED lights for your fans - you must install this crap; if you want to customize your mouse somehow - install this other crap. Same companies have not one, but two software suits that manage different peripherals.

Razer is the worst of these. Asus ROG takes second place.

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I recently picked up a new mouse and was shocked by how much of a problem this has become.

For RGB controls check out https://openrgb.org/.

The UI is pretty bad but once you figure it out it works great otherwise.

As an aside, are there any periferal brands that are known for minimalist drivers etc?

I’m just going by the screenshot on the website, but I think the UI looks fine just the way it is.

My Glorious Model D and Model O mice works perfectly fine with the normal HID driver. I suppose there's an app for RGB control and changing the DPI settings but the defaults are fine for me. It doesn't attempt to download anything when I plug it in.

Or my personal favorite: The old tool that did exactly what you wanted, didn't need to start with the system, and didn't require login gets 'upgraded' to a more intrusive new version that has 1/10th as many features and doesn't work right anymore.

The windows 10 settings app takes personal offense to this comment

<Start Key> Control Panel

"What are you crying for, Windows 10 piece of shit settings app that doesn't understand how to let me control individual sound devices the way I want?"

i have a shortcut on the lower-right of my desktop called "real windoze sound settings" (linking, of course, to the actually useful windows sound settings) for exactly this purpose xD

You need EarTrumpet! It replaces the janky windows 10 sound thing with a more modern (and actually useful) one. There's also a registry hack to just enable the old one that opens mixer, if you'd like.

I had to install software to turn off the lights on my CPU cooler (wraith prism included with an AMD CPU) - it's ridiculous.

Same for me and my GPU!

I had to install drivers from the Arch User Repository to turn off the lights on a Razer keyboard. It still stays lit and in color-cycle mode unless it's plugged in directly to a USB port on the laptop.

If you're exclusively running Linux, you actually can't turn off the lights on a GTX3000-Series card :c

I had been meaning to google how to do that... thanks for saving me the time :(

Does that mean you have to temporarily install Windows or plug it into a PC with Windows, turn off the lights, and then go about your day with Linux?

I'd just open up the card and unplug the cable to the lights. It's not a bad idea to open up the card to reapply thermal paste/pads anyway if you're hitting the card hard, a lot of manufacturers don't do a great job with heatsink contact, thermal paste quality, or both. On the lower tier cards in their product stack half the time there won't even be thermal pads on the vrm or memory chips. And recently I saw a post where powercolor forgot to remove the tape from the thermal pads at the factory [0]. And no, in most countries they can't void your warranty for opening it up.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/oyu1j6/thanks_powercol...

Why? Not even with proprietary nvidia drivers? If it's using a proprietary interface I'd expect those to be reverse engineered for such a major product.

Oh god, that's just the worst. My laptop defaults to maximally bright blue lights for the keyboard whenever it's turned on. Had to keep Windows 10 installed just so I could turn that shit off via proprietary manufacturer crapware that takes one minute to even get an unresponsive interface on the screen. Pissed me off so much I reverse engineered it into a Linux program that does it instantly.

Seriously what are these manufacturers thinking? It's like they go out of their way to make things as bad as possible.

Yes, and it is extremely aggravating! It's always some incredibly shitty proprietary software with a bloated gamer interface that takes seconds if not minutes to even start up.

My laptop came with this crapware too and it pissed me off so much I reverse engineered it into a simple free software program that turns all the stupid lights off instantly.

Turns out all these shitty apps do is send a bunch of USB configuration packets which were easy enough to figure out with wireshark. The Razer products do the same thing, open source code is already out there. Sometimes they use convoluted interfaces like I2C and ACPI/WMI. Haven't had luck with these.

> Razer is the worst of these.

Given Razer's general shenanigans, such as tracking mouse and keyboard behavior and sending it to their cloud (without which, by the way, much of their new hardware simply won't work), their unintentional breaches of security pale in comparison to their deliberate breaches of privacy.

You should give the Gigabyte software a spin. It’s really bad.

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