The logitech unifying receiver is a device logitech provides with every wireless device that can be set up to connect all your devices with it. It has the advantage of
- One dongle -> All devices
- Wireless
- No setup-pairing. Well, only one time per dongle.
I also didn’t want to install logitech spyware. So here’s what I did
- Arch Wiki
- Not sure what to do?
sudo pacman -S solaar - Power on device and set up pairing mode
- Solaar will pick it up if you pair it
- Done.
As an extra, I needed the evdev symlink so that I can set up kmonad. But I saw nothing short of a usb/logitech keyboard. This response in reddit gave me my answer:
Looks like what’s happening is since the 2 wireless receivers for the mouse and keyboard are pretty much the same, /dev/input/by-id can’t tell the difference, and only links to events from one or the other. I fixed it by linking straight to the events, which I found out by doing ls -l /dev/input/by-id, which lists 4 events of whichever device was last plugged in
Why
I’m leaving this sort of introductory text at the end, only because this is a wiki post and not an article. I really should write about this some time.
So I’ve had the MX Master 3 for a while. Works great and it’s a great mouse. I’ve always used it through bluetooth and it has pros and cons, but the thing that’s always felt a bit off to me is the fact that I’ve always needed to wait for bluetooth to come up before I can use the mouse. It’s often not a big deal because set up has to be done once per system. But still, it shouldn’t be like that.
Also, totally unrelated, at some company where I worked, my boss was really into ergonomic keyboards, and so I tried one there for the very first time. I even set up spaceFN over in Linux with that keyboard. Go figure. Anyway, I remember that keyboard being really comfortable. I could write in it for hours without feeling any sort of tiredness, which I have felt in repeated ocassions with some keyboards, even with fancy build materials, keycaps and switches.
And so I decided to get an ergonomic keyboard. The Ergo K680 was the one I got and seems great. I can already feel that it’s better to type on than the one I’m currently using.
And I didn’t want to set it up with bluetooth. I already have 2 logitech unifying receivers and it seems like a waste. So I decided to set both devices up with the receiver, so that I can use them with any device I like if I carry my dongle around. It’s not ideal, but it’s wireless and setup-proof.