'Razer Doesn't Care About Linux' (gnome.org) 377
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.
Not contradictory statements (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You gave a time frame. Razer didn't. (Score:2)
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.
Re:You gave a time frame. Razer didn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
The article is about a reply from a support ticket, not any sort of official statement by Razer.
Someone in media should contact them officially.
ROCCAT cares about Linux. (Score:2)
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
Re:ROCCAT cares about Linux. (Score:5, Insightful)
You assume the docs exist. You assume the docs are in distributable form. You assume the docs are written in a readable manner. You assume the docs don't contain important secret stuff.
Just validating those assumptions takes up the time of skilled experienced staff that the companies have already committed to to delivering other work.
So are you willing to pay $200k to cover the cost, opportunity cost and losses due to disruption that diverting this resource would require?
Just that, you seem willing for the companies involved to incur those costs.
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You assume the docs don't contain important secret stuff.
I'm sure there are a lot of really important secrets in their firmware installation protocol </sarcasm>
In general I'm sympathetic to your point, but in this case we're talking about something really trivial.
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$200k is tiny cost compare to cost to society of what cost to not have Linux Drivers.
While I think the actual number is almost certainly much lower, your line of reasoning here is ridiculous. If society wants Linux drivers, society should pay for Linux drivers.
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I think society will survive just fine without Razer Drivers for Linux.
Re:ROCCAT cares about Linux. (Score:5, Informative)
Then make a proposal to Razer.
Come on now, msmash - you've got a nice bully pulpit here. Get in contact with Razer and ask them to put together a cost analysis of what it would take, get the number, and then Kickstarter it. If there's enough interest in it, then it becomes cost-neutral for them to do it (or even profitable due to increased sales they wouldn't have otherwise gotten because of lacking support), and there's literally no reason to oppose it any more.
Don't just bleat about it being a tiny cost of other people's money and shit all over someone else with completely valid concerns - that's what the uninformed do. Get up and do something about it if it's important enough to you to "find it sickening and short sighted" and implore someone to rethink.
I implore you to do the same.
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Curiously your comment doesn't show as a response to mine - I had to click on 'parent' on one of the comments replying to you.
I find it sickening and short sighted that you did not come to same conclusion.
I find it curious that you would have such an emotional response to your own assumptions about my views, which, incidentally, you misunderstand.
Rethink your statement
Ok. Let's see.. reasons a business may not want to engage with this guy? Cost, opportunity cost and losses? Hmm.
Yep, thought about it, still looks the same to me.
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$200k is tiny cost compare to cost to society of what cost to not have Linux Drivers. I find it sickening and short sighted that you did not come to same conclusion. Rethink your statement and post below.
So a private company must burn $200K out of its own pocket to reduce a cost to society, a cost members of society does not want to pay itself.
Got it.
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And what if the process of "putting the bloody firmware into the bloody device" involves decrypting, or otherwise authenticating with some form of secret that is kept close?
You expect them to just give this secret away, openly, allowing the teardown of their firmware by competitors (in this example) ?
Hint: there may be more in their decision than simply saying "no." There might even be a reason.
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And what if the process of "putting the bloody firmware into the bloody device" involves decrypting, or otherwise authenticating with some form of secret that is kept close?
Then they're doing it wrong.
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I have an old Saitek pad (something 880?) and it works fine on the ras pi retrogaming distro whose name escapes me right now.
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Retropi.. you literally had the words next to eachother.. But still fun system.
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Yes, logitech devices likely work in bog-standard HID mode under Linux. However, if you want to use all the features of some of their devices, it requires other software to to be loaded on the system, which doesn't exist for Linux. For example, if you buy one of those mice with a ridiculous amount of buttons on them, how do you define what all those buttons do without the application that allows it?
Right now, the answer is "find a machine with Windows or OS X (or dual boot), plug it in, set your device up
A few days ago???? Try years. (Score:4, Insightful)
Razer what? why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Razer what? why? (Score:2, Interesting)
I enjoy their hardware, but your comment did touch on something I was going to mention: since Razer has decided that full features require account registration, what ever made submitter believe that they would ever support firmware updates in this manner?
Re: Razer what? why? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worse than that. Their software is cloud based.
So for example, to change the keyboard lights or mouse lights or mouse function buttons or use anything besides basic 2-button HID mouse:
1) Set up an account on Razer
2) Have client software running on windows.
3) Have holes in firewall so that client can connect
4) Your settings, for your local mouse/KB mouse, are stored in the cloud.
5) If it loses connection to the cloud you can't change any of your settings.
6) IIRC it requires cloud access on startup, otherwise it loads default profile.
FOR. A. MOUSE.
Never again.
Re:Razer what? why? (Score:4)
I bought a Razer keyboard. Why do they need me to create an account and allow them to track analytics about my usage for a louse mouse.
I had intended to buy a Razer Blade, but after my experience with the keyboard, that company scares me. I can't imagine why anyone would buy a Razer product where Linux support is necessary.
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High end gaming hardware (Score:5, Informative)
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... [intel.com]
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/... [slashdot.org]
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth pointing out that when the CEO made his comments, the response here was less than enthusiastic
This is a key downside for Linux for many reasons:
1) The community has shown to be toxic with constant infighting.
2) The community is highly aggressive to anything which doesn't 100% meet their core values. Create a gaming hardware, good. Open source 99% of the firmware, great. That 1% is a closed source binary blob, BURN DOWN THEIR HEADQUARTERS!
3) The community is small so the cost benefit ratio sucks.
4) The community is fussy and has high standards (see all of the above).
5) The community generally isn't of the hardcore gaming type.
Why would any gaming company chose to support Linux when gamers have shown to be more than happy* to run Windows / stuff around with Wine to play their games.
*And by more than happy I mean they whine less about running Windows for games than the do about something in Linux not being 100% perfect.
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. They exist to sell hardware to people willing to pay for overpriced stuff (i.e., gamers, the new audiophool). Practically all of them run Windows and knows nothing else, and they probably get their sales from people who see their boxes at Best Buy, go "ooh shiny" and whip out their credit card.
Serving Linux might work if there's a sufficient business case for them to well, sell more hardware, but if the community does what it usually does and says just buy a Model M and be done with it for keyboards or buy a cheaper mouse rather than buying the overpriced stuff, well, that's something they'd rather do without.
That's the problem - the article was about an engineer doing an engineering solution, but the company didn't get the part where it would benefit them. Yadda yadda yadda software does this, blah blah blah. Nowhere does it say "Your hardware is awesome, and there a huge untapped market if you would sell it to Linux users but we need Linux software".
Most of it is pure business decisions - if you can make a cogent case that Linux would help them sell more of their stuff, enough to outweigh the risks and costs, then they'll do it.
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Exactly. They exist to sell hardware to people willing to pay for overpriced stuff (i.e., gamers, the new audiophool). Practically all of them run Windows and knows nothing else, and they probably get their sales from people who see their boxes at Best Buy, go "ooh shiny" and whip out their credit card.
The interesting thing is Windows is free if you're a gamer. Either you buy a laptop and it comes with a Windows licence. Or you build a machine and just live with the unactivated version - the only limit is that you can't change the theme/color scheme/wallpaper from the control panel. Though you can right click on an image and set it as wallpaper. And you have a 'Activate Windows' watermark in the bottom right of the desktop. None of which is too bad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I guess MS are worried ab
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I guess MS are worried about SteamOS - people building $500 PCs might use SteamOS if Windows were $99 but they probably won't if they can get away with the unactivated version for free.
It's a trap. Enough people get used to using it, they'll take it away because they know those people are hooked on Windows programs and they'll pay to keep playing them.
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:4, Funny)
I've always thought MS should do something like this
1) Initially unactivated Windows runs normally
2) After a while the screen develops a one pixel black border
3) The border gradually grows
4) When wide enough cockroach like bugs occasionally sneak in
5) When enough roaches are on screen they grab the mouse pointer or move icons on the desktop
6) However moving the mouse pointer will initially scare them off
7) Later on they lose their fear of the mouse pointer and brazenly walk on the main screen, not just the border.
8) At this stage you can still click on them and they will be destroyed with a squish animation. If you leave the machine locked when you unlock it you'll spend a minute battling bugs.
9) Windows will offer you "Microsoft insecticide" the price of which will be a Windows license
The reason I like it is because you'd go into shops in China and people would be frantically clicking to kill the bugs on their pirated Windows
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The reason I like it is because you'd go into shops in China and people would be frantically clicking to kill the bugs on their pirated Windows
Korea would turn it into an e-sport.
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:4, Funny)
The reason I like it is because you'd go into shops in China and people would be frantically clicking to kill the bugs on their pirated Windows
Korea would turn it into an e-sport.
And would be better at it than anyone else in the world.
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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
Perhaps the wallets of Windows and Mac users are enough for Razer. I can't imagine there being much profit in the Linux arena to warrant any additional effort on their part. You are talking about a niche product line for a niche OS.
Obviously describing Linux as a niche OS will get some people hot under the collar but it is when compared to Win and Mac. Feel free to disagree - this is slashdot after all.
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I'm a hardcore gamer.
For perspective, my home office has 6 computers in it - my gaming laptop, my gaming desktop (for dual boxing), my media center, my wife's gaming laptop, her gaming / movie watching desktop, and her work laptop (she works at home). I think we have 4 Razer Nagas in the room, along with a couple other brands of mice.
Last week I decided it was time to upgrade the laptop I had before this laptop from Windows 7 and repurpose it as a gaming laptop that I could take on the go. My curr
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The community is small, but it consists primarily of more tech savvy users...
When non tech savvy users have problems, questions, or need advice on what to buy they go to these more technical users. If you alienate these users, they won't recommend your products and might even advocate against them.
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If you alienate these users, they won't recommend your products and might even advocate against them.
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. They have made some of the most durable PCs in history, notably the EEE701. I accidentally THREW mine into a corner once, I was carrying too many things, they started to slip, I made a grab and failed. The display bezel did pop apart, but it snapped right back together.
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Somehow I don't think Razer's sales are impacted much by "IT professionals" but more what 15yo "leet" gamers with LED Christmas trees for PCs think is cool. Or maybe what they're favorite twitch gamer uses to get that 0.002 second egde on the competition.
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target the platform users instead
Linux has very few "platform users" that aren't part of the "community". That is what happens when you effectively become a tech savvy niche market. The platform users start talking to each other. More so the fact that the entire platform is built around the principles of a community.
And [citation needed] that the majority don't fit the description. We've been doing nothing but fucking infighting for years now and I'm seeing a lot of forums become more and more elitist and hostile over the past 10 years.
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
6) Lennart Poettering
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If they're dual booting, can't then run the firmware update in Windows?
If I were a manager at Razer trying to work out whether to assign an engineer to do LVFS submissions, I'm sure that argument would occur to me.
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
tl;dr: Ignoring this issue is not a good way to get repeat purchases and referrals from their core demographic.
Hilarious. Their core demographic is l33t gamerz. Very few (popular) AAA games live outside the Windows camp. Not just because you can't install the latest GTX 1080 cards in iMacs and Macbooks.
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Graphics in games are completely overrated.
Ever played Eve Online, WoW or god forbid: Minecraft?
All great games with appropriated (low hrade) graphics, they all would run on a pentium 2 perhaps.
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Eve Online needs a dual-core Pentium 4 as absolute minimum, WoW needs a Core2Duo, Minecraft needs a Core i3. None of them will run on a Pentium 2.
And Minecraft, especially, needs as much hardware as you can throw at it. It's horribly optimized. Though the Windows Store version performs better than the Java version.
'Bad graphics' does not necessarily mean 'low system requirements'.
And it's not a case of 'good games don't need graphics'. There are some fantastic games that will use all the horsepower you can
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They need that as 'required by the install program'. ...
They don't really need that computing power
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And Minecraft, especially, needs as much hardware as you can throw at it. It's horribly optimized.
Yep. Mojang's recommended system is a machine with a 3.5 Ghz CPU and Nvidia 7xx series GPU or better. 3.5 Ghz!
Though the Windows Store version performs better than the Java version.
That's because that version is based on the console version's code! Which is itself derived from the original Pocket edition codebase. It had to be efficient. Unlike Notch, 4J's programmers aren't aspies who were fixated on Java and who can actually write efficient code.
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It doesn't surprise me at all. PC Gaming is basically a Windows thing. Razer know that.
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Razer used to sell Mac-specific mice, with provided software, but they stopped years ago.
Not gaming products; just nice high-DPI mice with a few extra buttons.
The hardware was basically a white version of one of their Windows mice, but the software was actually pretty good. But they never updated it and eventually it stopped working as the OS updated.
Re:High end gaming hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
That's another reason why companies like Razer don't like non Windows. Traditionally Microsoft have gone to great lengths to keep old third party software running. Of course that's not as true as it used to be. XP SP3 and Vista broke insecure software and the message from Microsoft since Windows 8 has been that the Win32/Win64 API is going away in the long run. Still I've got some binaries built with Visual Studio 6 on NT 4.0 which run fine on Windows 10. You could never do that with Mac software - they've made loads of breaking ABI changes.
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- has been pretty much tied to Windows since the late 90s
- also which share of games work on Macs? On Windows it's 99%
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I've always wondered what caused Apple to blacklist Nvidia and only use AMD GPUs. For a while it seemed like they were GPU vendor agnostic. Now it seems they'll only use AMD for discrete GPUs and only Intel CPUs/integrated GPUs, to the point where Intel are doing a device that has and Intel CPU and and AMD GPU on the same package. Which I'm sure is aimed at Apple.
Then again Intel apparently hates Nvidia even more than AMD.
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When they still had a real "Pro" Mac Pro that had PCI-E slots in it, there was a small but effective community that kept figuring out how to make Nvidia cards work in it - custom firmware flashes, driver edits, etc. They did the same for ATI, but the efforts of Nvidia always got more attention due to the professional community wanting to use CUDA acceleration on a Mac (how dare they!).
The last Mac Pro that shipped with a useable PCI-E slot shipped in 2012. Now the only options are "use what Apple deems ac
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Clickbait (Score:2)
High end? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. They make EXPENSIVE (but extremely breakable) peripherals and skimp on the QA.
In the end, nothing of any value was lost.
Razer keyboards are not high-end (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Well (Score:2)
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.
No gaming hardware manufacturer cares about Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
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 w
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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.
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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.
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Try flying a Warthog in DCS without decent hardware and we'll talk about "cheating", ok?
Back In The Day (Score:3)
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.
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your understanding of the history of Direct X is full of ignorance. They didn't go to Direct X because of "other" OS support of Open GL, they went Direct X as they wanted a unified hardware access layer for devices, sound and graphics, Open GL was only graphics. Also Direct X won at the time because it actually produced faster and better rendering for games, that combined with the sound and input devices made it more cost effective, especially when most gamers ran windows only anyway.
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That's nonsense, it's quite obvious to anyone who knows something about PC and Microsoft history that they went in the DirectX direction because they wanted to maintain the application barrier. Microsoft being a software company, the application barrier has always been their main competitive advantage and they have done and are doing everything - incomplete standards, undocumented features, anti-reverse engineering techniques, embrace & extinguish, many many law suits, etc. - to maintain that applicatio
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To be fair OpenGL lagged behind DirectX quite a bit, and even today hasn't reached parity without vendor specific extensions (like games consoles get). Especially in the early years when things were moving quite fast it usually took OpenGL a while to support the latest features that DirectX did.
Microsoft are dicks but if it wasn't DirectX it would just have been some proprietary Nvidia or ATI thing. In fact a lot of games of that era did support manufacturer specific features on top of DirectX.
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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
Let me dust the cob webs off on your post. Your point is not really that important anymore. It was important 5-10 years ago though. The new game in town is DirectX 12 vs. Vulkan. Vulkan is cross-platform but yet we still don't see the games on Linux, why is that? There's no excuse right now based on Graphics API. Vulkan delivers an equivalent or better experience both in terms of fidelity and performance compared to DirectX.
However, if you want to go back in the time machine. Where Microsoft pulled a
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OpenGL wasn't appropriate for gaming, to a large extent still isn't, and DirectX was also about making the rest of the toolset for games available; sound, input, networking. And don't forget that even using OpenGL at all for games was a backlash against needing a custom version for 3dfx, RivaTNT, Matrox, S3, Rendition, Trident, etc etc.
Lets not revise history too much, here.
This is certainly helpful... (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
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Same company would probably very quick to release a press released saying "Look, our stuff works on Linux!" if anybody reverse engineered their protocol with zero input from them.
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"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.
Even worse - right in the summary:
"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."
So nobody is able to capture the USB traffic of the same thing happening in Windows and reimplement? There's numerous tools that will save the bitstream and allow you to analyse it later. I've done similar for two way radio programming / query information - I can't see this being much different...
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I'm not defending Razer; I don't give two shits about them.
I'm criticizing "Richard" and/or the "anonymous reader" (which may or may not be the same person) who submitted this bit of bridge burning. The company said that they aren't interested in Linux; now they have a reason to care less.
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Their software sucks (Score:2)
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.
Why would they care about PC Linux? (Score:2)
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It has nothing to do with drivers. Most games use DirectX which is proprietary to Microsoft. Porting to open platforms is almost like rewriting the game. The reason why some games are cross-platform is because they use a game engine that supports multiple backends, like e.g. Valve's source engine.
It's not just about the rendering, by the way, but also controller input, app store integration, network stack, etc.
So what... (Score:2)
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 b
"For Free" could be expensive for Razer (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Must all vendors support Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly none of them have to "support" Linux aside from coughing up some documentation. Sending an email to claim they don't have the man power to send an email is a pretty obnoxious way to lie about it.
Re:Must all vendors support Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you one of those developers who never write documentation?
Or how do you come to the idea that writing documentation (and dealing with questions) requires no man power?
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Nah, he just has a Technical Writer assigned to his team, and their time doesn't count. Everybody knows that.
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It's a trade secret, or it contains third-party licensed specs, or it has a few security flaws... or there's just a slim chance of any of those, so the whole proposal requires review by at least 15 engineers and a small army of lawyers, plus all the senior management.
I'm as much a fan of Linux as the next guy, but even discussing something outside the original scope is an unexpected cost. At least they were open about that and provided a response.
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Right. Because all it takes to release internal documentation is for some support guy to grab the doc and mail it out to whoever asks. Brilliant.
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Yeah, because detailing specifications about how hardware interacts is exactly the same expertise and effort as blowing someone off.
False equivalence.
Re:Must all vendors support Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sure Razer is terrified at losing the massive Linux desktop market. After all, 2018 is the year of ...
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Re:Must all vendors support Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux (the OS not the kernel, as opposed to Android which is a different is with a Linux kernel) isn’t really setup for the consumer market. It works as a server OS and a workstation OS. But it never caught on for the general public.
This makes Linux a waste of resources for gaming companies.
Say 5% uses Linux at home. 85% of this group will be willing to use non-open source software. 50% of this group is interested in serious gaming. 25% of this group may be interested in their products...
For gaming it is a tough business model to be Linux friendly. Not impossible but it takes a lot of effort and resources for a small return.
It isn’t that Linux can’t do it, it is that not enough people are using it to make it with the effort.
Razor employees may love Linux. But they can not justify the expense in supporting it. And digging all the legal to make things open enough for the community to do something about it.
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For gaming it is a tough business model to be Linux friendly. Not impossible but it takes a lot of effort and resources for a small return.
It doesn't have to be that way.
Consider the Linux version a console port, no different than you would the PS3 or XBOX. Then instead of worrying about every possible hardware setup out there make sure it works with the systems on this page [steampowered.com] and say fuck-all to the rest. Once it works on those systems on factory settings it's going to work for most of what's out there.
Doi
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Consider the Linux version a console port, no different than you would the PS3 or XBOX.
The funny thing is that the PS3 is BSD based and the PS4 is a full fledged BSD system so if there's a PS3/PS4 version already doing a Linux/SteamOS port would be "relatively" easy. Not as easy as doing a ./configure && make && make install of the source tree on a Linux dev system of course, but easier than porting from Windows to Linux.
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First of all, they support Steam Machines in the default config with Steam controllers, not Linux.
A good example of this already being done is Bit Trip Runner which works with Steam Controllers and XBOX 360 controls but completely ignores even Steam level control configuration so that it's only compatible with that setup and flat refuses to work with others. They've said fuck-all to people like me who prefer PS3 controls and they don't support anything. The game has still sold well. I think they're assho
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Ubuntu asks the installer about LVM, GRUB, streaming updates during install, there's a couple screens about keyboard detection, the ability to add web servers or print servers, along with other functions, all as part of the process of installing. YES, you can ignorantly click next on each screen, but the point remains you still have a couple dozen times you need to click next.
This is again, false.
You are right about the keyboard selection. Were you perhaps installing "Ubuntu Server?" You don't need to setup your bootloader, LVM, or any of that stuff. I just installed Ubuntu 17.10. "Like 5 clicks" about sums it up.
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Actually, it must be an error of some port. :D
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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.
Eit
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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.