More Linux Utilities Come For USB Logitech Devices

[Sonadow]

They are still to lazy to create a full featured webcam driver, even as MS market share was down already two years ago to 78%. We probably have to wait a little longer
as they are only discovering the mobile market...

Maybe that is because most people are already using notebooks connected to an external display to serve as their 'desktop' and since notebooks already have their own webcam that is 'typically' picked up and detected by Linux they don't see the need to change?

[deanjo]

That I have to agree. Yesterday I was out shopping for a replacement keyboard + mouse after having accidentally dumped a whole pitcher of water over my existing hardware and spent some time comparing between a Logitech wireless combo package and a Microsoft wireless combo package. (it did not kill the keyboard but I just wanted to have an excuse to get a new keyboard...)

The Microsoft set had a bigger keyboard with higher keys that provided much better 'squishiness' than the Logitech and its mouse was both larger and had a higher curvature than the tiny mouse offered by the Logitech package. And the Microsoft set cost only about $4 - 5 more than the Logitech set. Twas a no brainer; picked the Microsoft set without any further hesitation.

Well my experience has been opposite with Logitech devices. They have always been reliable for me. I even accidently dumped a whisky and coke on my HTPC K400 a few weeks ago. Figured I had nothing to lose so I threw it in the dishwasher, let it sit for a couple of days and fired it up. Works like a new keyboard, touchpad and all.

[Sonadow]

Well my experience has been opposite with Logitech devices. They have always been reliable for me. I even accidently dumped a whisky and coke on my HTPC K400 a few weeks ago. Figured I had nothing to lose so I threw it in the dishwasher, let it sit for a couple of days and fired it up. Works like a new keyboard, touchpad and all.

Like i said, it didn't kill the keyboard. I was just using it as an excuse to treat myself to new hardware.

[brosis]

Spare me your moral high ground. If you are so ethical and upright, throw away all your electronic devices because all of them are using patent encumbered technology in some way and most of them are made in China by workers who live below poverty level and get paid peanuts. Go live the life of a hermit in the mountains in isolation with nothing but the clothes on your back and no electricitry. I dare you.

If Microsoft are nazis than you are a terrorist and everyone's public enemy no.1.

I know you have no honour and ethics, but remember that, the ones who support terrorists are terrorist.

I would never buy anything from Microsoft. Supporting a company ran by the modern equivalent of nazis is not something my conscience could abide with. But I guess some people just aren't very ethical...

I hear you!

That's the thing, Microsoft is actually in the same boat as Sony. They both are really good hardware manufacturers. Their hardware products are usually top-notch. But their software is what's horrible. So if you don't buy Windows, but buy their hardware, it's actually a pretty good message overall. And there is nothing bad in it in the slightest, because MS hardware is supported as well on Linux as Logitech.

Yes, MS hardware is comparable to Logitech and usually mid-high quality.
But remember two things:

It is microsoft, that Logitech does not support Linux.
If you purchase something from one division, it doesn't matter - the corporation still recieves money and distributes it the way it sees.

So, by purchase of microsoft, you support Logitech policy. All my friends who purchased Logitech wrote an email to Logitech requesting Linux support. Just that they know how stupid they are.

[YAFU]

Except that Linux support has improved. Well, at least where the OSS driver is concerned. It's defiitely fast enough to serve as a drop-in driver for non gaming-related activities on Linux in its current state today.

Catalyst is still behind on supporting recent versions of xserver, but Ubuntu generally keeps its xserver packages in sync with the version supported by Catalyst. I believe Catalyst currently supports xserver v1.13, which is currently what Ubuntu 13.04 uses, so Catalyst 'should' work barring any unfortunate incidents.

For Fedora, the best option is to use X -1 version of the distro and stick to it for as long as possible, where X = latest released version. OpenSUSE and Mageia both have longer release durations as well so their xserver versions are typically 1 version below the latest upstream, which should play nice with Catalyst.

I'd go as far to say that if anybody wants to use a dedicated AMD graphics card on Linux with the open drivers, AMD is by far the best bet (barring Southern Islands).

I think the Intel OpenSource driver is much better than ATI's. And it is officially supported and developed by Intel.
I've been using ATI for years, and have suffered their deceit and lies. Now I know that AMD/ATI free up the obsolete specifications only to leave their "not so old" cards unsupported and make the community take care of its maintenance.
Currently I have an nVidia and Intel HD 4000. By far the proprietary driver from nVidia and Intel OpenSource are much better than any of the drivers from AMD/ATI I tryied.
Yes, I think this is offtopic anyway.

[brosis]

I think the Intel OpenSource driver is much better than ATI's. And it is officially supported and developed by Intel.
I've been using ATI for years, and have suffered their deceit and lies. Now I know that AMD/ATI free up the obsolete specifications only to leave their "not so old" cards unsupported and make the community take care of its maintenance.
Currently I have an nVidia and Intel HD 4000. By far the proprietary driver from nVidia and Intel OpenSource are much better than any of the drivers from AMD/ATI I tryied.
Yes, I think this is offtopic anyway.

Well,.. one could call it as "lack of manpower" as far as I see it.
But if one wants performance on opensource drivers, Intel still has hardware to provide, while AMD software to maintain.
With closed source, yes, no questions. But if you don't want closed source, see above.

[mike4]

Has this been mentioned before? Anyway have a look at:

https://opensource.logitech.com/open...ce_at_Logitech

Webcams work yea but by fully featured I mean, zoom, move lens around, change resolution and things like that. The default Linux drivers are not smart enough for that.

[brosis]

Has this been mentioned before? Anyway have a look at:

https://opensource.logitech.com/open...ce_at_Logitech

Webcams work yea but by fully featured I mean, zoom, move lens around, change resolution and things like that. The default Linux drivers are not smart enough for that.

My c905c works, changes resolution/fps, autofocus switchable.
Webcams are different. As long as Logitech adheres to standards like USB UVC, there are no problems whatso ever.
The problem, and its with input also, if one deviates from standard, by using extensions or own protocol... and decides to support only one system.

Thats exactly why Sun sued microsoft, when ms tried to embrace expand extinguish Java with own uncertified virtual machine.
We can't sue Logitech,.. but we can boycott their products.

[GreatEmerald]

I'd go as far to say that if anybody wants to use a dedicated AMD graphics card on Linux with the open drivers, AMD is by far the best bet (barring Southern Islands).

You have one too many AMD in your sentence there Unless you mean that it's better to use AMD and not Sapphire or so.
But yeap, lately the r600g driver has been improving a whole lot. Even before the UVD drop it was really good, and now it's even better.

I think the Intel OpenSource driver is much better than ATI's. And it is officially supported and developed by Intel.
I've been using ATI for years, and have suffered their deceit and lies. Now I know that AMD/ATI free up the obsolete specifications only to leave their "not so old" cards unsupported and make the community take care of its maintenance.
Currently I have an nVidia and Intel HD 4000. By far the proprietary driver from nVidia and Intel OpenSource are much better than any of the drivers from AMD/ATI I tryied.

Actually, I also have NVIDIA and Intel on my main device, and AMD on two other devices. And, well, I have some nasty issues with Intel here, something that never happened with r600g. But then I can't really file bug reports, as my kernel is tainted by the NVIDIA blob, and I don't want to keep uninstalling it every time I want to test whether the IGP works better or not.

If you purchase something from one division, it doesn't matter - the corporation still recieves money and distributes it the way it sees.

Yes, but they should be able to see which division earn what amount of money, and if their software division is doing poorly, then obviously they need to change their policies.

[dee.]

Infantile logical fallacies? Spoiken like a kid who has not even seen a tiny bit of the real world, or has not even known the real meaning of hardship.

Gets accused of logical fallacies > decides to prove the opposition wrong by throwing around ad-hominems... there should definitely be a meme about this.

Hehe, you couldn't be more wrong though. In actual truth, I'm 30 years old, and if you're going to talk to me about hardship... come back to me when you've spent a minimum of three years homeless, without a job, thousands of euros in debt, watching many of your family members/friends die in a short period of time... trying to combat depression and substance addiction for about ten years... let me know when you've spent a substantial part of your life on the rock bottom, lying in a metaphorical (sometimes literal) ditch, and then pull yourself back up and build your life back together, going through treatment, education, paying off debt, building your life back piece by piece... when you've gone through all of that and gained some years of maturity, THEN maybe you'll be qualified to talk to me about "hardship". Until that glorious day, kindly shut the fuck up about things you don't know shit about, fanboi.

You don't even have any proof to back up your claims, period. You are just another one of those 'it sucks because its Microsoft' people

Let's stop your angry and misguided fanboi rant right here, period. It's always the first instinct of every ms fanboi I've seen to instantly assume the defensive position of "you're only saying it sucks because it's microsoft!" But when you really, actually think about it (if you're capable of such a feat) it's actually interesting... you're in fact saying, that microsoft's reputation is so bad, that most people just assume it "sucks because it's microsoft"... why would they have such a bad reputation, do you ever wonder? Even people who don't know much about Linux or FOSS or couldn't give a shit about software ethics are most of the time cursing microsoft and have a sort of resigned, grudging attitude towards windows, kind of like "hey, it sucks, but what choice is there, mac? haha lol".

So now you try to turn that bad reputation around, and use it as a defensive position against microsoft, like "everyone is just saying that microsoft sucks"... like, the fact that microsoft has a poor reputation, that most people know their products suck, somehow counts as a merit for them? Insane troll logic, ahoy.

ANYWHO, another point ms fanbois ALWAYS bring to the battle... "you have no evidence!" Can we get Penn & Teller here? Because this smells like BULLSHIT. There's plenty of evidence for anyone willing to LOOK with open eyes. Start from the wikipedia page of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_microsoft and work your way up there. That's only the tip of the iceberg though. If you can truly put aside your biased views and fanboyism, you can find so outrageous things about microsoft, it's mind-boggling how they are even allowed to operate (well it's not really... can anyone say "political bribery"? but I digress...). There's a veritable wealth of legal documentation showing exactly how microsoft has stolen, cheated, abused, committed pretty much every dirty trick in the book to get to where they are now during the last decade or two. Does it not even make you wonder how microsoft has been sued so many times for anti-competitive practices?

Groklaw is another good resource. They have plenty of good articles documenting the abuses of microsoft. Most recently, microsoft is passing out software patents to trolls like cheap cigars, using them as proxies to attack Linux, Android and FOSS in general.

who only know how to rat on anything without even being able to see the greater picture, and the whole basis of your malice towards Microsoft is really just "they don't give us the source code of that software so that FOSS can use

No it's not. The basis of my "malice" towards microsoft is the way they have used anti-competitive practices for the past decade. How they have cheated, lied, stolen and frauded their way to the top. How they use patents as weapons. How they have twisted the arms of OEM's to prevent competing OS's from being sold with computers, and how they have basically made windows a mandatory purchase when buying a computer, which has only been started to be remedied in the last couple of years. How they use things like UEFI/Secure Boot to underhandedly hinder the adoption of competing operating systems. How all of their products are riddled with "features" that are hostile towards user freedom, such as DRM, ads, spyware. How they lobby to politicians and spread FUD and lies and are inherently hostile towards user freedom. How they have tried and still try to wrest the control of the hardware away from the user with "trusted computing" schemes. And so on.

it', which has nothing to do with ethics. 'Ethics' is just a word you throw it to make yourself think that discriminating against powerful closed software puts you in some sort of moral high ground when more than half of the world's software developers and endusers really don't give a crapshoot of whether the tools they use on a daily basis are proprietary or not. The basis of almost all the world's economic activity is built over Microsoft technologies. The driving force of virtually all computing and hardware consumerism is also directly tied to Microsoft.

Driving force? Please. Microsoft hasn't done any actual innovation since windows 3.1. Everything they've done since has been by smaller companies they've acquired, or copied/stolen from other companies, or from free software projects. Microsoft might have innovated once upon a time in the faraway past. It doesn't anymore, it became big, bloated, fat and complacent. Now it only acts as a gatekeeper, trying to keep away market disruptors, actual innovators, by abusing flawed patent and copyright systems.

The actual innovation is being done on the FOSS side. Microsoft is an old dinosaur that deserves to die.

History has tons of examples where new technologies introduced by competitors failed to take off until Microsoft came in with their own implementation. Touchscreen notebooks had no place in a consumer's home until Windows 8 shipped, and now you see people all over asking 'does this notebook as a touch screen' before even finding out more about new computers.

In what reality? Have you even seen windows 8 sales figures? No one really gives a shit about windows 8, or touchscreens on laptops (other than ms fanboi hipsters). It's a failure and doesn't drive any sales.

And tha is just the consumer side of things. A boy like you will never have seen just how deeply entrenched Microsoft is in the server and enterprise space (hint: their server share is much, much greater than 40% Wikipedia will have you believe). If Microsoft collapses the core computing technology that drives the management of the global economy will freeze overnight and collapse.

Oh, now there are some secret, invisible market shares. You don't have any sources or evidence, but we should all trust you when you say so. Right.
Oh, and microsoft drives the global economy now. Riiight.

Just one question: does microsoft also pay for the meds that keep you in your made up distorted reality?

Don't give me all that ethical bullshit about monopolies when you can't even accept the fact that Microsoft is capable of making more polished software than the competition. The most ubiquitous RDBMS package in the FOSS world, MySQL, can't even hold a candle to SQL Server if we are to compare them on core functionality alone (an RDBMS that does not even support the full SQL standard and ignores the all important CHECK command? you serious? Even IBM DB2 and Postgres does, damnit). And for the sake of ethics you are insisting that companies stick with an inferior solution just because it is FOSS, because it's so ethical to demand that a business ruin itself by not using the best tools for its business and going with inferior FOSS solutions. What a joke. OpenOffice.org (and now LibreOffice) had YEARS to build up its reputation and challenge MS Office for the desktop office suite, and today we have v4 of Libreoffice that has an interface which looks ripped out of Office 97, can't even grammar check properly, can't format paragraphs properly and can't even SAVE pictures properly. And programming? Vi may be great, but when it comes to IDEs there's nothing the FOSS world can offer that can even remotely come close to Microsoft Visual Studio. Even the latest versions of Eclipse and QtCreator is no where as polished and well-integrated into the respective operating systems that they are installed in as Visual Studio on Windows. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration: I do have to use Eclipse when I practice on Java or on Android and its a-ok, but if VS will provide support for the Java SDK i'd do my practices in VS anytime. And I WILL admit that the one area Eclipse trashes VS in is its support for external plugins.

Ok, I don't even... what is even going on with that paragraph.

"But they are not ethical so we should boycott the best tool for the job and use inferior solutions that will involve massive retraining and migration costs!" is what you will claim. Time to wake up from dreamland, boy. Companies exist to do make money and how they do it is their own business.

Nice, more juvenile strawman argumentation. So I guess all the companies who submit code to the linux kernel - the largest FOSS project in the world, like Red Hat, Oracle, Samsung, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Google... they're all doing it for the kindness of their hearts? And I'm probably just imagining all the profits Google, Samsung and Red Hat have made with open source software? Or the fact that Linux professionals are being headhunted by businesses left and right, how Linux users are so wanted businesses are paying huge wages for anyone who knows their way around Linux?

You are a disgrace to the world of software. Somebody who has not even written code for others have no right to determine or judge the value or the 'ethicality' of it, regardless of whether the code is open or not.

Actually, I have every right to judge the ethicality of whatever, as has everyone else. This may come as news to you, but people are allowed to think for themselves, instead of sucking the corporate teat of microsoft and buddies. Everyone has the right to look at the facts and make conclusions based on them, like I have done. And the facts show clearly that microsoft uses unethical business practices. And not that it matters but I have written code, my first time writing code was in the 90's on a C-64.

What you're saying is basically the equivalent of "anyone who has never manufactured cigarettes has no business determining the 'ethicality' of the tobacco industry". Or "anyone who has never mined for oil has no business determining the 'ethicality' of oil industry". Kind of ridiculous, don't you think? (The correct answer is yes.)