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'Razer Doesn't Care About Linux' (gnome.org)
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: Razer is a vendor that makes high-end gaming hardware, including laptops, keyboards and mice. I opened a ticket with Razor a few days ago asking them if they wanted to support the LVFS project by uploading firmware and sharing the firmware update protocol used. I offered to upstream any example code they could share under a free license, or to write the code from scratch given enough specifications to do so. This is something I've done for other vendors, and doesn't take long as most vendor firmware updaters all do the same kind of thing; there are only so many ways to send a few kb of data to USB devices. The fwupd project provides high-level code for accessing USB devices, so yet-another-update-protocol is no big deal. I explained all about the LVFS, and the benefits it provided to a userbase that is normally happy to vote using their wallet to get hardware that's supported on the OS of their choice. I just received this note on the ticket, which was escalated appropriately: "I have discussed your offer with the dedicated team and we are thankful for your enthusiasm and for your good idea. I am afraid I have also to let you know that at this moment in time our support for software is only focused on Windows and Mac." The post, written by Richard -- who has long been a maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, points out that Razer executive Min-Liang Tan last year invited Linux enthusiasts to suggest ideas to help the company make the best notebook that supports Linux.
"Saying it and doing it is just a different thing. Just as much difference as night and day!"
I would like to learn to read music this year, and welcome suggestions on how to do so, but I'm a bit busy this month, and my focus is not on that task at the moment.
TFA complains of a vendor which does care about Linux
Must all vendors support Linux?
Well, sorta. They don't actually try to sabotage 3rd party efforts at least. Purportedly they've even donated some hardware to the guy who works on the Linux driver anyway. They don't recognize his support as official or anything like that. It's sad that this is as good as it gets.
Other popular pointer device companies that hate Linux so much they spend more effort and man hours drafting an excuse than it would take to just forward the docs:
Razer
Saitek/Mad Catz/Cyborg
Logitech
I remember when it was first suggested that Unity3d be ported to Linux... the request garnered a large following on their requested features forum, and by all indications it seemed like it was never going to happen, but then about three years after the request had been proposed on their feature request website, it materialized. While it still hasn't evolved to the point of being an officially supported platform, it's still a welcome addition for doing unity development.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is this the same Razer that requires you create an account on their site just to use a mouse? If so who cares? This company is total shit anyway.
If they're making expensive laptops to play games, are Linux users their intended market?
Also referencing "Meltdown and Spectre" is a bit bogus. Intel CPUs have a firmware update facility but that's already supported.
https://downloadcenter.intel.c...
And the kernel already does KPTI.
Sure they could assign someone to do LVFS contributions to do firmware updates for their USB devices, but I guess their priorities are elsewhere. It's not at all clear that significant numbers of people are not buying Razer USB devices because you can't update the firmware on Linux. I'm guessing some support engineer got the request, escalated it up to management and management said "No".
It's worth pointing out that when the CEO made his comments, the response here was less than enthusiastic
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In other news, gaming gear company reliant for profits on people not circumventing it's proprietary registration tools, makes machines that work with the sorts of OS that the vast vast majority of Gamers actually use, and doesn't see advantage in making it easy to circumvent it's proprietary tools.
Actually, it must be an error of some port. :D
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
This is the Slashdot equivalent of clickbait.
Negative PR repercussions sometimes doesn't enter the equation as a manager waves off something that is not strictly in his scope that day.
Most companies don't give two shits about Linux, free software, or your project no matter what they claim. It's called public relations. This is what probably happened here and the companies advertising "support" for Linux frequently are the worst.
My job entails sourcing hardware that'll work in Linux for certain large companies. I have worked to get and improve support for hardware under Linux because the situation is so bad that I have no other choice. There are simply certain types of components for which there are multiple companies designing chips and yet there exists no real support. And no your proprietary blob that works with kernel 3.6 only doesn't fucking count and works for NOBODY. Your hardware isn't the only fucking hardware my clients have to have support for. They NEED to be able to run newer kernels.
Supporting Linux is almost always little more than a public relations stunt. There are very few companies who have gone out of there way to improve the support situation for Linux users thats been much more than this. The people pushing support behind the scenes are many, but companies doing the most good can be counted on one hand. How many wifi chips or graphics chips or ANYTHING of significance has Dell succeeded at getting a complete set of sources released for? I can tell you it's zero.
Instead of supporting these shitty companies we should be supporting the one or two companies that are actually working on, pushing, and funding projects in returning control to the end-user and the community. There is ThinkPenguin, of which has several projects from embedded devices to chipsets to engineering projects amongst others that is probably the only real well known exception to the public relations stunt. There are a few others of which not one of them you're likely to have heard of (Ohh there are some projects in regards to CPUs that might be worthy of respect although the names escape me).
Don't get me started about the fraudulent actors out there who claim to be releasing code and then letting the community do all the work (I'm not talking about Mini Free, that guy did actually do something even if a lot of it was based off Coreboot, there is another guy Todd whose little more than a fraud). And no Dell doesn't do shit to get code released for anything that matters. Nor does System76 or any of the other "Linux" companies. Hell- they're all mostly shipping shit that they nor the community can even support because the community doesn't have the source code for various components being used. I can't tell you how many Linux companies I've bought from whose products were supported worse than chance than the support compared to a random Windows laptop that I might install Linux on.
They had already made the Razer Forge, but managed to pull it from market before it really had a chance to gain market penetration.
From what I was lead to understand, it actually provided an oem unlocked android install with the option to install linux out of the box. Compared to the Shield at the time it was about 2/3s the price and until Nouveau caught up on Kepler features for the K1, it had much better GPU support/specs in comparison.
Having said that: Razer has never been very Linux friendly. Just go and look at their OSVR platform and the level of Linux support it has going on 2 years later (Nevermind its formerly touted open hardware features, which while still more 'open' than the competitors, isn't really open enough to be an alternative to its competitors while also losing on price, features, or software compatibility in the majority of cases.
Interestingly, from a software point of view, it looks like the Sony VR headset is actually the most straightforward to support on linux, using a camera exclusively for depth and motion tracking, but costing 350-400 dollars for a device that is only x1080 per eye instead of x2160 per eye (Not sure what the other half of the resolution is, since most of them are a normal cellphone LCDs with a partition keeping each lense's view to itself, while at least a few of the competitors were working on per eye LCDs as well.)
It's Razer, but the reDhaT employee that logged the ticket didn't even have the decency to spell their name correctly.
OK, We'll do this: Razer don't care about Linux because their target demographic also don't care about Linux. Only hardcore Linux geeks obsessed with getting everything to run on Linux because it's "better/purer/freer" etc care, but they care to a passionate, frankly evangelical degree. Linux to them is scripture. They are so all-consumingly obsessed with it's superiority that to not support it must either be an error to be corrected, or ideological impurity to be attacked.
Either way, in the venn diagram of hardcore gamers and Linux evangelists, the number of people in the intersection is statistically irrelevant to Razer.
No. They make EXPENSIVE (but extremely breakable) peripherals and skimp on the QA.
In the end, nothing of any value was lost.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Razer is not seen as "high-end" within the high-end keyboard community.
Their mechanical keyboards would better be described as "entry-level" into the world of mechanical keyboards.
The build materials are cheap. They have gimmicky features.
Most of all, their marketing is atrocious, misleading and often borderline fraudulent.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I might've been understanding of their plight, if only it wasn't for the fact that GNOME developers are happy to exploit their sugar daddy advantage of RH to force their way in the FOSS landscape. Now they get to feel how it is like to be the little guy again, maybe they should take some time to enjoy their humble pie.
-- Linux user #369862
2. Your declaration of victory based on entirely missing the point is entertainingly trumpian.
3. You make (incorrect) assumptions as to my neurodiversity status.
4....everyone knows, when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of "u" and "umption". - Samuel L. Jackson.
That's the sad truth these days. At best, and that's about as good as it gets, they don't actively sabotage anyone trying to write a driver for Linux for their hardware. To make matters worse, your chances are good that your 100-button-mouse doesn't even work properly as a two button mouse in Linux.
In the end, you will notice that playing games in Linux means that you'll do without anything more sophisticated than a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel and a standard keyboard. No flightsticks, no steering wheels, no macro keyboards or mice, not even game controllers for the most part.
If anyone knows of any gaming hardware that actually works properly on Linux, please say so. I know not a single example of gaming hardware that does.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Their products may be marketed as such but actual quality is mediocre. Then there's the dreaded accompanying software... .
I bought a razer deathadder chroma about 3 years ago. Within 12 months, the middle mouse button stopped working reliably. I got it replaced under warranty, and within 6 months the replacement mouse did the exact same thing - middle click stops working. There are guides online as to how to fix it, but they're temporary fixes (your hand pubes get into the button clicker inside or somesuch). I'm now using an old microsoft wheel mouse optical which is - what? 10 years old? - and still works perfectly.
There's a lot of open source support for these razer devices under linux (eg. Polychromatic, openrazer-daemon), but I think that what the linux community should be doing instead is just steering people away from what is ultimately just overpriced shit.
If you go back far enough into gaming history [back to when Bill Gates was running Microsoft, before Ballmer took over], you would get to a heated competition between two graphics APIs. First, there was OpenGL, the "Open Graphics Library", which is somewhat self-declarative. The other was "DirectX", which was driven and maintained by Microsoft.
IIRC, in the very earliest of days, Microsoft actually supported OpenGL, but then spun away from that and created their own API, DirectX [which they still support].
Now the main reason that Microsoft switched from OpenGL to DirectX was because OpenGL was supported by other Operating Systems, not just Windows. Which meant that games would be available for those platforms, which meant, ultimately, that OpenGL became a lever to threaten Windows... So that's why MS eventually wrote their own. The problem that they created for themselves was that they had to suddenly convince games studios to support their new API. And, in it's early days, DirectX was not well understood, not well supported and, well, a bit clunky.
To help bring what we'd now call Triple-A titles to DirectX/Windows, Microsoft actually had teams of developers who would literally go to game studios and offer to port their game code to DirectX, for free. . And that's how DirectX became the dominant API in the gaming space, eventually killing off OpenGL in all but name.
Once MIcrosoft had the two main graphics card manufacturers on board with this [now nVidia and AMD] the natural evolution was to take this model - at least in part - and apply it to other peripherals. So around the time that Creative moved on to the X-Fi hardware platform from their earlier, non-PCI-based cards, so Microsoft began working with Creative on driver development. The particularly observant might have noticed or might remember that there was a marketing campaign at the time, "Runs on Windows". This was, in essence, a program in which Microsoft financially contributed to the marketing and advertising for peripheral makers... However - and here I need to stress that I've never seen the terms of any contract Microsoft produced [NDA and all that], there was a lot of scuttlebutt at the time to suggest that in the small print of these support deals was a clause that basically said, "Terms will be void if you develop or provide support for your hardware for any Microsoft competitor OS" [or equivalent].
Now, that was a very different Microsoft, so we have no way of knowing why any well-respected hardware manufacturer would make life difficult for the Open Source community, but the inference was that this was just very simple, very basic market forces. Microsoft didn't want to invest their time, money and effort in a company not dedicated to supporting Windows, and had a cheque book big enough to help make sure that happened.
Does this apply here? Not sure. Not even sure that this history is entirely accurate as I've represented it. If you really wanted the skinny on this sort of thing, the man to ask would be Greg Kroar-Hartman. If anyone in the OS community would know what's going on, he would. [Although his role moves around a bit, he was the guy who led the "Device Driver" program for Linux during key periods of this history.
Try flying a Warthog in DCS without decent hardware and we'll talk about "cheating", ok?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"We asked this company to help us out and they told us that they weren't interested so I guess now we're just going to publicly call them out as a bunch of shitbags so that next time I bet they'll bend over backwards to do what we ask."
Ah, the old "aggressive asshole panhandler" routine. Works every time.
Log in or piss off.
Got a Razor Lancehead. To my surprise to take full advantage of all it's abilities I have to create an account with them. For a fucking mouse? You kidding me? Never will buy another Razor product.
I loved their mice.
Then the driver changed.
It became an always-on background task, which reported information back to Razer, which auto-starts on boot.
It's a MOUSE DRIVER. It does not need a PROCESS which is ALWAYS ON.
It was exactly like RealNetworks. Remember their video codec?
Playstation 3 gamepad. Linux was the first desktop OS to properly support it. It's basically just a Bluetooth device but there is some custom stuff in there that needs special support if you want more than just the basic buttons.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I bought one of their mice for the office because left handed ones that I can use for hours without problems, are hard to find.
When I got my new PC and needed to install drivers(because I don't do reverse buttons so I need to swap them in software for the mouse and not in windows), they now required me to logon to their "cloud" to install their drivers. Something I can't do at the office.
L'Idiot
Most games don't natively run on Linux. It's just not taken seriously as a PC gaming platform. PS4 runs Orbis OS, a modified version of FreeBSD but games have to be written specifically for that platform. The problem here is cross-platform and for some reason, at least for PC's, it's preferable to write games for Windows and only in some cases make them compile cross platform to run on Linux. If I remember correctly, some of that has to do with inconsistent drivers and too many distros of Linux. Maybe someone can really shed some light on more specifics about this problem? I've said it a million times, if Ubuntu supported all the software I run on Windows 10, I would ditch Windows without blinking and forget it even existed but something is in the way and has been in the way for a long time. Can someone shed some light on that?
We'll make great pets
Here starts the rant: Razer is crap that installs capware like practically all of those "gaming" hardware companies. I don't understand why gaming hardware companies continue to believe that gamers want ugly design, additional background processes, and additional utterly useless system tray clutter. They don't. Oh, and if you need a mouse designed to be unusable in almost every respect, be sure to get a "Madcatz" gaming mouse. All these companies offer are blindingly bright LEDs, overall bad hardware, and bad drivers.
One point that should be obvious to anyone who has worked in a business is that getting someone's services like this "for free" is anything but.
First, there's the straight up cost: Lawyers vetting contracts, employees gathering and then vetting information, etc.
Then there's the small possibility that somehow, somewhere, this turns out to cost Razer big time - they accidentally expose a competitive secret, the person puts out malware in the Linux Razer driver, the person uses the information to build targeted malware for the Windows side, the service provider turns out to be a Russian spy and it's linked with Razer.... It doesn't matter how ridiculous the scenario, there is some chance of a very bad thing happening.
And then think of the benefit. Zero. (Okay, maybe they sell another 2-3.)
So, in which world can this be justified as a rational business decision?
In most situations like this (unusual disclosures, not business as usual, no going forward as a line of business), a medium-sized company might want perhaps $50K up front, a larger company might demand 3-4 times that. Anything less than that is simply too little return for the risk.
You are far more likely to get the kind of support you want from a small company for which the gain of supporting Linux has *real* marketing value to them and thus the company they're putting at (small) risk isn't *that* valuable compared to the benefit.
That's actually the other way around, it's OS supporting hardware, not hardware coming with drivers for the OS. Else Windows would be not supporting anything, not even MS very own XBox Controllers work without additional drivers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That would be a good analogy had the statement from Razer given a time frame for Linux support, comparable to the time frame "beginning between 28 and 365 days from now" implied by your comment.
More than likely, while you know you could easily help them out, your integration will cost them money in operational costs you aren't thinking about. Now imagine all of their stuff has XYZ OS support. Now they have all those users, customers, calling in expecting linux support. Is this a realistic assessment? I'm not sure but it is food for thought.
Yep. If someone asks me what kind of laptop to buy, I don't even hesitate. I always say ASUS. It doesn't matter what kind of laptop they are looking for, or how much they want to spend, ASUS not only has an answer but it probably won't suck. [Praises Eee PC] and their driver support tends to be top-notch.
On the other hand, ASUS made the Transformer Book T100TA, which Debian contributors still haven't managed to get working after several years.
No flightsticks, no steering wheels, no macro keyboards or mice, not even game controllers for the most part.
If anyone knows of any gaming hardware that actually works properly on Linux, please say so. I know not a single example of gaming hardware that does.
I personally have used PS2 (via USB dongle), PS3, and PS4 versions of the DualShock under Linux. Also I have the PS3 Playstation Eye camera and the Playstation "Silver" headset, both work just fine under Linux as a camera and headset.
And I just right now configured a Saitek x52 for basic flight controls in the Linux version of War Thunder running on Fedora Linux.
DCS is Windows only, but as I said, I just "right now" configured a Saitek x52 for basic flight controls in War Thunder. Pitch, Roll, Yaw, Throttle.
Yep, in fact when I first used a DualShock 3 with Linux it was far far easier to use it with Linux than it was with Windows!
The DualShock 4 also works just fine with Linux (with perhaps a few udev rules depending on distro), tested it out with Steam's Big Picture Mode on Linux.
What's the problem you have with Unity on Linux, exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I use Linux when I don't have to use Windows. I have a Razer Blade Pro that is not at all Linux friendly that I really wish I had not wasted my money on. At least a hundred people a year ask me what computer they should buy -- I don't tell them to get a Razer.
Besides their almost going out of their way to NOT support Linux, their software absolutely sucks. The 17" Blade Pro has this cool touchpad and function keys that all have their own little LCD screens. Also the touchpad is off to the side, which I like and I don't think any other notebook manufacturer is doing. The problem with it is the software - it is very unreliable, has constant huge updates that will break it almost every time, usually needing to be deleted then re-installed., and it's is not at all open. At one time they at least had an SDK kit that you could download, but not anymore. Any apps for the touchpad hardware are only developed in-house. On top of all this, the software requires an on-line account to function??? I don't know who is making the decisions at this company, but you would think that a gaming notebook would at least try to support SteamOS, if not have it as an option as the default OS.
No more Razer anything for me.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
AC can't even get their complaint right...
Unity's original platform was MacOS, and was designed to be cross-platform, and succeeds quite well at it.
Linux & SteamOS are explicitly supported, and have been for a while...
I've been playing the 64-bit version of Kerbal Space Program (which uses Unity3D) on Linux for probably four years at this point.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Likely the conflict between those who like Linux as a technical achievement and those who like it as free software.
Linux has previously only ever been supported as a target... the editor was not available for Linux until late 2015.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm afraid I still don't see how that would be a problem.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Unity being non-free. I certainly don't see that as an issue but evangelicals of the church of free software would argue that this is unacceptable.
If you follow the rantings of RMS you'll see those people sit on the "non-free software on a free os is worse than nothing at all" side of the camp.
I'm afraid I don't see how non-free software on a free OS necessarily makes the OS any less free unless any of the operations of the OS are somehow tied to the operation of that software.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm afraid I don't see how non-free software on a free OS necessarily makes the OS any less free
It doesn't, nor is that their argument.
Then what is it? If nobody's pushing anyone's arm to use the non-free software, what difference does the non-free software make to a free OS?
Honest question.... if it doesn't impact the freeness of the OS, and doesn't affect them because they aren't using the non-free software in the first place, then what the heck is the problem?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
More whining from the Linshit crowd. So sad.
Razer sells "gaming machines" to people who don't want to or can't build their own.
People who use Linux generally build their own, or are re-purposing an old machine to be useful as something else.
Either way not a lot of market overlap for Razer, so justifiably they don't care. Also while Linux has made some inroads into the gaming scene over the years, it has been and continues to be dominated by the Windows OS, so futher reason not to care.
Some Razer Laptops might be a bit of an outlier (as you can't build one really), but again the cross over between the Linux savvy and Razer laptop owner is probably minutely small. I suppose you could multi-boot but why load Linux on a 3-4000$ gaming laptop, just doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's not about affecting the OS, it's the network effects of people using non-free software on a free platform. Personally I agree with you, the ultimate freedom is a user's freedom of choice and users have that. Hardcore free software evangelicals disagree. I can't really speak to the state of mind that drives people like this though.
Though my opinion on this is that such people should write their own kernel without the provisions that allow non-free linkage to the kernel that Linux has. Of course if they do that it's unlikely to gain any traction and to just fail.
What are those effects, exactly? I'm seriously trying here, but don't see any point of view that could cause a person to be upset about what software another person uses unless it was somehow affecting them, or people they are trying to defend in some way.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The more ensconced people get in using certain tools and develop the ecosystem around them the harder it is for them to move away and the less resources there are for funding/developing free alternatives. Once you have an incumbent it's almost impossible to unseat them without some disruptive innovation (again I see no issue with that) and a free software also-ran is not disruptive or innovative.
I don't think it's that difficult to understand but I think it's difficult to justify that point of view unless you're a free software absolutist.
It's not hard for people to move away from using non-free software if they weren't using it in the first place. If Joe is a free software absolutist, and Jane is okay with using non-free software on her own system, Jane isn't using software that takes anything away from Joe when the developers of that product wouldn't have wanted to cater to Joe's market in the first place. At best, both Jane and Joe would be without the software if they had not developed the non-free software. How does Joe defend Jane by dictating to her what software she should or should not run?
It seems ironic, and certainly self-defeating, that people who one would expect to be espousing freedom and freedom of choice would in fact wish to deprive anyone who might disagree with them of theirs.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yes, don't worry I understand that. I'm not particularly adept at arguing that point of view given it's not something I agree with but it seems they don't want their 'free platform' polluted with non-free software. The idea around restricting freedom of choice is the same religious argument of saving you from yourself, again not something I subscribe to.
Also in your case Jane is unlikely to be contributing anything to the free software version if she is using the proprietary one, but that just runs into the same stupid "loss of potential profits" arguments the MPAA/RIAA make about the damages of copyright infringement.
In any case if you want an argument best to reach out to the FSF ;)
I don't want an argument either.... but I'd like to try and at least see some kind of logic to their point of view.
I mean, Joe isn't contributing anything to the free software version either if all he does is use the software, without contributing anything back.
Or is it their opinion that everyone who is not a programmer is harmful to the free software movement?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm afraid I don't see how non-free software on a free OS necessarily makes the OS any less free unless any of the operations of the OS are somehow tied to the operation of that software.
Oh, the hard free softwarers say software SHOULD be open, completely, as a moral issue, and closed software takes away resources from free software.