Today, I was re-introduced to why I despise peripheral software... And why I wish there was a open standard for managing hardware peripherals.
You see, Windows 23H2 introduced dynamic lighting. The idea is that if you have a compatible device, you can have Windows handle the RGB lighting, Other programs have done this (And with much better support!) such as OpenRGB and SignalRGB. Microsoft themselves say that my device (A Logitech G203 LIGHTSYNC) is compatible, quoting verbatim from their compatibility list:
Logitech is partnering with Microsoft on Dynamic Lighting. All Logitech G LIGHTSYNC RGB devices are supported.
Well, that solves it then! Well... Not quite. To get it to work, you need to be running G-Hub. I should have learned. I should have learned from my experience with my M100 failing, and my MK270 connection issues, and the choice not to make the MK270 compatible with the unifying receiver, and their awful consumer software... I should have. But I naively believed that because it was part of Logitech's G Series, it would have better software.
Now, it's worth stating, I brought the G203 before 23H2 came out, but when I updated to it, It just refused to work, sort of. I like my RGB simple. I have it set to "Solid" with the option "Match my Windows accent colour" enabled. This means the colour that buttons and other parts of the operating system are coloured by is also what the mouse is coloured as.
It does work. For a couple of milliseconds, before it turns off. I tried everything, rebooting, reinstalling G-Hub, reinstalling windows (Which did work until today), disabling logitech_lamparray_service in services, turning dynamic lighting off and on again. The only thing that really works is changing the brightness and back, as you can imagine, this gets very annoying very quickly.
You really shouldn't be having to run G-Hub for RGB, especially since OpenRGB and SignalRGB can detect and use it just fine, which makes me question why Microsoft didn't just do that...
Regardless, I still have to use G-Hub, because I tried to use to use Logitech's Onboard Memory Manager (Or OMM for short), honestly, this is something I can admire Logitech for, Allowing users to use a basic piece of software to manage it instead. Unfortunately, OMM is a bit too basic. The one thing that really kills it as a option is that you cannot choose to map the two buttons to scroll up and scroll down... Why? There's no reason to do this!
Then we get onto iCUE... While G-Hub was bad, iCUE is diabolically bad. I have never experienced a piece of software this unstable before. Here's a tip, Install it, set the RGB lighting for when iCUE isn't running, then uninstall it. Stability clearly wasn't a priority, since it almost constantly crashed when running... I got rid of that trash software years ago... And it still frustrates me to this day.
The only piece of peripheral software I got on with was Microsoft's Keyboard and Mouse Center. It hasn't been update recently (Probably because Microsoft hasn't made a new keyboard or mouse since then). It was pretty basic, couldn't do much, but what it could do, it did well... If only Microsoft continued making the Sidewinder line... And maybe developed a open standard or something...