Hi, I'm a long-time Cherry Brown fan, and decided a few months ago to expand out into the realm of RGB keyboards that do per-key dynamic lighting via API. Probably my #1 game I play these days is Overwatch, and despite my very negative experiences with Razer software 10 years ago, I decided to give them a go with the Razer BlackWidow Tournament Edition Chroma Stealth (with their so-called "Orange" keyswitch, somewhat like the Cherry Brown). Hardware is ok... soft-touch plastic which I'm not the biggest fan of, keycap font which is 'meh', and a USB cable/socket with an angle to it (why?). Software experience has been passable to not very good at all. Razer Synapse v3 has been in (permanent?) beta forever, and when I got the keyboard, just didn't work. Synapse v2 worked fine for a few weeks, then stopped working, I removed it, reinstalled, worked fine for a while and then didn't again. Went to newer beta of v3, which worked for a while, then didn't, reinstalled then did, then didn't (it's the programmable lighting I'm talking about here, i.e. the standout feature I'm bothering with here). Keyboard with the same software on another computer worked fine, so not the hardware. Opened a ticket, which ultimately had me removing the software and then doing manual cleanup of everything, reinstalling software and reconfiguring the keyboard settings, and it was fine but I kind of had it with the merry-go-round of Razer software not working and figured since I had a Logitech G403 mouse already and the Logitech Gaming Software installed that their Pro G keyboard uses, why not try that...
That does mean though that I need to use Aurora (open source, third-party software available at
https://www.project-aurora.com/) to act as an API translation layer because Overwatch's per-key lighting technology is Razer specific. Logitech G Pro hardware is good and the Logitech Gaming Software is very stable (unlike Razer's Synapse). Not as much game title specific support out of the box, and the software doesn't seem as flexible as Razer's, but it's generally cleaner and more comprehensible (really all this stuff has mediocre at best UIs). Aurora though is beta software (currently v0.6.3) and so far in my use it's been a little flakey. Has anyone else here been using it, and what has their experience been? I'd like to know if it's an inherent Aurora issue, or an Aurora + Logitech issue, and wondering if I should go back to the Razer keyboard (I was thinking of selling it, but now I'm not so sure). Aurora shows up as a plugin inside of the Logitech Gaming Software, but it always has weird high-ASCII (asian) characters for a name, not western characters, which seems like something might be getting corrupted or not read correctly. The install instructions for Aurora when integrating with the LGS say to disable the DOTA 2 and CS:GO plugins in LGS since Aurora supports them natively and they'll conflict, and while I can disable them in the LGS that setting does not seem to stick across reboots (LGS keeps re-enabling them, which has me baffled). And then when we get to the one feature I really care about, per-key dynamic lighting in Overwatch, sometimes Aurora doesn't work, and they logs aren't showing me anything that's a smoking gun for why. My next step will be to open a ticket with the Aurora dev, but before I do that I was curious what everyone else was experiencing? Or if anyone has any opinions about this stuff (i.e. maybe all this stuff is just still basically beta quality across the board and I need to lower my expectations?)
While my computer is very stable (custom built Threadripper workstation with ECC RAM, no overclocking) I have over 1200 games installed and I do wonder if any of these keyboard makers have tested their software with a system with that many games installed (they scan the entire system for installed games to determine which game modules to load/activate and sometimes in their UIs I have to wait a minute or so for them to finish scanning my system, despite that everything is either on SSD or has layers of RAM cache and dedicated SSD caches for the hard drives, so I'm not sure they planned from at least a performance and perhaps a stability perspective to handle a system like this...) So maybe that's a factor... anyone else with lots of games installed try this stuff?
