And of course they had to shoehorn some AI bullshit in it

(why I installed this driver: because i can remap the two extra buttons as copy/paste)

  • ØR10N5B3LT
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    2046 days ago

    maybe this will help, if you wanted to ditch the logi driver:

    https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar

    Solaar is a Linux manager for many Logitech keyboards, mice, and other devices that connect wirelessly to a Unifying, Bolt, Lightspeed or Nano receiver as well as many Logitech devices that connect via a USB cable or Bluetooth. Solaar is not a device driver and responds only to special messages from devices that are otherwise ignored by the Linux input system.

    • ☂️-
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      35 days ago

      piper is also great. openrgb works too if all you want is to change led colors.

    • @[email protected]
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      156 days ago

      I hope one day theres something similar to this, but for 8bitdo.

      I have an 8bitdo keyboard, and in order to map my buttons, I need to boot up a windows 10 hard drive, do my one time edits, save them to the keyboard, and THEN I can turn off the pc, swap back to my ZorinOS hard drive, and THEN I can go about as normal.

      And if for some reason somethings wrong, or didn’t take, I’d have to repeat the whole process all over again.

      All because the keyboard manager doesn’t work on linux. But it’s not logitech.

      • @[email protected]
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        226 days ago

        Sell the 8bitdo keyboard and buy one instead that is capable of running with QMK or ZMK firmware and is configurable by either VIA or VIAL.

        • Da Bald Eagul
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          45 days ago

          Wooting keyboards are also really nice, and are configured through a web interface. It’s also a Dutch company, so if you want to buy European it’s definitely a good choice :)

          • clif
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            15 days ago

            A web interface? Is the keyboard running a webserver or is it remotely managed by the manufacturers website?

            I’m confused about configuring keyboards via web app.

            • Da Bald Eagul
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              15 days ago

              Nah just a website you navigate to and then it communicates over USB. There’s a desktop app too but it’s just an electron wrapper.

          • @[email protected]
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            106 days ago

            I’m going to assume these are open source apps because for some reason that’s how those guys like to name stuff.

          • @[email protected]
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            146 days ago

            QMK and ZMK are FOSS firmwares that can run on Atmel AVR and ARM chips like the RP2040.

            VIA or VIAL are config utilities that you can use to remap your keyboard on the fly.

          • @[email protected]
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            36 days ago

            Trust the process. Just buy a VIA or VIAL enabled keyboard and enjoy ra easy graphical setup.

      • @[email protected]
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        56 days ago

        I have a Flydigi gamepad and I can use a virtual machine with tiny11 to change the configuration. The connection isn’t super stable but for the few times I have to do it, it works.

  • @[email protected]
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    6 days ago

    holy fucking shit. I once programmed a mouse driver for an 8 bit computer with 32kb of ram. I don’t remember the exact size of the compiled driver but it was under 1kb.

    Today’s tech companies probably couldn’t even figure out a way to make a hello world in python without it needing 100gb of storage, an Intel Core9/AMD Ryzen 7000 or better, an internet connection and an online user account.

    • @[email protected]
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      55 days ago

      The actual driver for an HID USB device, even on WIndows, is still just a few KB.

      Worse, the default driver for HID devices like mice, keyboards, joysticks, gamepads and so on is part of Windows since Windows 7 and all you had to do was give it an INF file that really just associated USB hardware devices that sent the PC a specific identifier (made up of a VID and a PID value) on USB protocol initialization, with that built-in driver - and that file is maybe 100 bytes. Even better, that INF file is not even needed anymore since Windows 10.

      A driver for a mouse (pretty much the simplest Human Interface Device there is) that in addition to the normal mouse thing also supports setting the RGB color of some lights is stupidly simple because the needed functionality is already in the protocol.

      Remember, modern digital electronics still uses really tiny processors sometimes with less than 32KB flash memory (and way less than that in RAM) only they’re microcontrollers rather than microprocessors now, hence the protocols are designed so that they can be handled by processing hardware with little memory (after all, many USB Hosts aren’t PCs but instead are things like USB HUDs which have microcontrollers not microprocessors)

      I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that almost the entirety of that 1GB is bloatware.

  • Mwa
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    175 days ago

    i wonder if a open source driver alternative exists.

    • @[email protected]
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      645 days ago

      Piper is less than 2MB, and allows reconfiguring Logitech mouse buttons. It’s available in Debian and Ubuntu package managers.

      Screenshot:

      I had to use Piper to get exotic features like having mouse 6, 7, 8 buttons function as mouse 6, 7, 8, rather than the default of alt-tab and ctrl-v.

      • @[email protected]
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        145 days ago

        This is not a driver. The README itself says:

        Piper is merely a graphical frontend to the ratbagd DBus daemon

        ratbagd itself, BTW, is also not a driver.

        The unofficial open source license is called logiops, and according to the Debian site most of its builds are also under 2MB (and the two builds that aren’t are only slightly bigger)

        There is also RatSlap, which I can’t find information on how big it is (and I’m not going to bother installing it just to find out)

      • JackbyDev
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        25 days ago

        Does it still allow macros? I have a couple of 502s and my older one has fallen victim to the common problem of rhe switch getting bouncey so one click becomes multiple. Supposedly macros can fix this.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 days ago

          I’m never buying another Logitech device again because that problem that happened with my G7 back in the 00s still happened with my G900 in the 20s.

          With my G7, I’d open it up when it started happening, and open up the switch to re-bend the metal piece to give it some spring back. Kept doing this until one day the plastic button that presses down on that metal part fell on carpet and was gone forever.

          With my G900, I said fuck it and just bought some better mouse button switches and replaced the left mouse button. Was actually kinda glad I needed to because the battery had become a danger pillow so I replaced that, too.

          But with the button issue existing for so long and being fixed by a part that cost a trivial amount compared to what I paid in the first place, you can’t convince me that Logitech isn’t deliberately using switches that fail quickly to drive up demand for mice.

        • @[email protected]
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          45 days ago

          If your mouse drivers allow setting the debounce timer, you can set it higher so that your system doesn’t allow the bouncing to register.

        • Sabata
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          15 days ago

          My 903 did that, and so did the one they replaced and now your making me worry about my 502. It’s shitty switches so a macro would hide it for a little at best. I tried to replace them but these are not fun to open up.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 days ago

          This is a physical defect. Macros make one key press effect one or more action button or key press. For instance if a common operation involves pressing a b and c in sequence you can make one button on your mouse actuate that sequence.

          You can’t bind a macro to left click because then you can’t left click anymore. Even if you bound double clicking to single click (if this is even possible) it would mean every time it single click you would effect nothing which is equally if not more broken.

          You need to either take your mouse apart and fix it or throw it in the trash.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 days ago

              Its broken fix or toss this solution isn’t applicable directly. Also seems like it would be hard to intentionally double click and add latency to single clicks

              • JackbyDev
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                14 days ago

                Go tell the authors of that article then, I very clearly said I was only using it as an example.of what I meant by fixing it with macros and not saying it’s a solution I’ve looked into. 🙄

          • @[email protected]
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            35 days ago

            I think he meant as in “if this is the first ever GTK application you install via flatpak”. The “Installed Size” on Flathub only indicates the amount of storage the program itself will take up and doesn’t take into account the libraries it will install alongside it (installing piper via flatpak takes up 400MB on my device).

            I still think it is really negligible because people usually don’t install applications that use such a variety of different graphical frameworks, and also because modern PC disk capacities are so absurdly big compared to past ones. I only have a 256GB drive and have never faced any issues regarding how much storage flatpak apps use.

      • @[email protected]
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        55 days ago

        I never thought to look for something like this, but it looks fantastic so i’m going to try it. Thanks!

      • Mwa
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        35 days ago

        would be cool if it also worked on Windows and Macos

  • @[email protected]
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    976 days ago

    wtf AI in your mouse driver?

    Oh yeah, totally not logging your every mouse movement, no sir, not at all!

  • @[email protected]
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    225 days ago

    +1 for using space sniffer. It’s the best of such apps I’ve found. Unfortunately doesn’t seem to get updated any more.

    • @[email protected]
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      85 days ago

      There’s something inside you
      It’s hard to explain
      They’re talking about you, boy
      But you’re still the same

  • @[email protected]
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    5 days ago

    That’s not the driver but some bundled configuration & update bloatware.

    Back in my days, you had to overwrite some .exe with a “0” to disable Nvidia from spying on you. The overwrite, because they would just download it again if you deleted the .exe.

    • @[email protected]
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      265 days ago

      I remember installing a fresh PC with win98. During installation, I disabled some windows bloatware (Imagine! You actually could do this!), and ended up with an unresponsive, non-windows app blocking the system. I killed that app and removed it from the system. Keep in mind that at this point, no network connection was set up, nor did I install any driver or program yet, this was straight from the windows install medium.

      After reboot, the app was back, and again blocking the system.

      Wiping the harddisk and starting installation over did not help either.

      Turned out this was some bloatware installed by the BIOS whenever it detected at boot that there was a) a Windows installation that was b) “missing” their “register your PC with us” app. This needed some Windows bloatware to work, and thus failed on this machine.

      This was the only time I angrily screamed at a hotline worker.

  • @[email protected]
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    645 days ago

    We detected you moved your mouse. Downloading 1GB of AI telemetry and 3GB of user experience optimizations…

  • @[email protected]
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    425 days ago

    The mouse driver used with the Commodore 64’s GEOS operating system uses 3 blocks on disk, less than a kilobyte.

    • @[email protected]
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      295 days ago

      Most of the reason why the Logitech driver is so gargantuan is a separate Chromium browser instance, because someone thought that apps should be all websites first, which lead to most GUI libraries being developed for javascript and most devs being taught to be web developers.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 days ago

        VSCode is also electron with a 100mb download size and 400mb install size. I think it has 1000x more functionality than some shit Logitech UI where you change LED colors. This sounds more like incompetence on the Logitech team than a problem with electron itself.

        It’s not like traditional methods of packing apps are without problems. If I want to install the qbittorrent flatpak on Ubuntu, it pulls in >1gb of KDE depenencies, so I really don’t see how that’s better than these dreaded electron apps.

        • @[email protected]
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          5 days ago

          Or you can use qbittorrent-nox which is a server-only package of qbittorrent and just interact with it via its the web interface from your favorite browser.

          Mind you, I only know this by chance because I explicitly wanted to run qbittorrent as a service on an always on machine which is not supposed to be used with keyboard and mouse.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 days ago

          The 1gb of KDE dependencies are one time only, but there’s also the option of just using OpenGL + bare x11 or Wayland for GUI. If my game engine could pull it off, if IMGUI apps could pull it off, then everyone could pull it off, we just need a UI framework not ddependent on either GTK or qt.

          • @[email protected]
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            15 days ago

            “One time only”? In theory yes, in practice I don’t have anything else that needs those KDE dependencies. When I remove qbittorrent I can safely remove them. This is just a reality check that desktop GUI frameworks and package management are really not much better than Electron/html as lots of comments in this thread seem to suggest.

            • @[email protected]
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              35 days ago

              That is your use case, that relative to your individual usage only one application uses the framework. In that very specific scenario, sure. However with electron it’s forced to be that way for every single application no matter what your scenario is.

              If electron packaged as a dependency, then it would be similar. But it’s always forcibly bundled.

              • @[email protected]
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                15 days ago

                Ok, I will just try to install more KDE apps so I can make use of that great dependency so I can join the Electron hating circle jerk next time. But from where I stand now, Electron apps are just like any appimage or snap.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 days ago

        A lot of fancy early RGB mouse came with a companion app that needed 10MB at most, and that was ridiculed.

    • Albbi
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      35 days ago

      That driver was using 0.5% of system resources! I thought it would be worse when I saw “259 blocks free”, but overall that’s pretty good.

      • @[email protected]
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        14 days ago

        Well that’s just a screen shot of the directory listing of the GEOS disk from the 64’s default “OS”, the BASIC interpreter. That 3 block file also contains information that only GEOS sees, the actual executable 6502 code is likely in the 500 bytes, if that. The user manual for the mouse actually contains an assembler listing of the driver. It ain’t big.

        The 64, of course, was never designed with a mouse in mind, so Commodore engineers used the analog paddle inputs to encode the mouse XY motion. So the “driver” really just reads the A/D converters for the paddles and fudges some kind of motion information out of it.

        It works quite well. The 64 only has a 320x200 display, so it’s not like you need a gaming 1000DPI 1ms mouse.

  • @[email protected]
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    545 days ago

    Fuck electron, fuck “web first” apps, fuck the “all application in the future will be websites” mentality.

      • @[email protected]
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        24 days ago

        Proton proves that you don’t need to run on a web browser for cross platform compatibility. Turing-complete platforms are equivalent in their capabilities, it’s just a matter of adding a translation layer that doesn’t need to be as heavy as a browser DOM (at least for going between windows and Linux on x64).

        • @[email protected]
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          13 days ago

          I’m not 100% convinced that an emulation layer isn’t as heavy as a browser.

          We had things like Java and QT, and none of it really took off. Apple is probably to blame here as well, for wanting everything to be native to iOS and ignoring the reality that developers don’t want to make five different versions of their software.

      • @[email protected]
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        34 days ago

        I get what you are saying and this is definitely a factor but I think the bigger influencer was mobile adoption. As soon as smartphones took off it was inevitable that we would see a surge in cross platform frameworks/libraries.

        The fact we tackled this problem by shifting everything to web apps was also inevitable given the more simplistic deployment requirements and maintenance costs of a website vs native application.

        I feel like I am shouting to the void when I talk about performance of modern software being unbelievably bad.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 days ago

          Yeah, I can see how it ended up like that, and it would at least be nice if Windows accepted that and had one copy of the browser rather than every app installing it’s own just in case of breaking changes.

          And it would also be really nice if it only clogged the system for when it needs to show a UI, but I’ve got a ton of background processes that are also running a browser just in case today is the day that I finally need to see them. Just looking down task manager now at some suspect large processes, I can see a Razer “mouse driver”, Epic, Discord, Steam, Nvidia, Oculus, NordVPN, Signal…

          None of these things need to be running a browser while I’m not looking at them.

          But hey, lets throw another 32GB of RAM in there, and another dozen cores, and maybe we can achieve the dream of running each of them all in their own fucking operating system as well…

          • @[email protected]
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            4 days ago

            Yeah and unfortunately it’s going to get worse when AI agents are also always running in the background (which is inevitable, let’s be honest).

    • @[email protected]
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      125 days ago

      Man, they really developed the most unfun layout system and then tried to force it to everyone

  • @[email protected]
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    95 days ago

    Saving this to share at work. What an abomination that, I am sorry you have to deal with it

  • billwashere
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    315 days ago

    I have several Logitech peripherals. Why in the fuck does it need AI?!?!