When I started my video podcast I needed a suitable microphone. The Samson Meteor Mic received a lot of good reviews, so I went with it (you can hear it in all episodes except the first one). It uses a cardioid pattern, meaning that it picks up most sound in front of the mic. Indeed, ambient noises that are far away don’t get a lot of pickup, so the occasional background noise won’t disturb your recording or call.

The mic comes with a mute button and a headphone jack/volume knob (so you can monitor your input without latency). It is chrome-plated and looks quite nice on any desk. The three legs are foldable, so it won’t take up a lot of space in your laptop bag. It also has a mic stand adapter, which I haven’t used.

Linux compatibility

This USB mic works fine under Linux (tested with the last three Ubuntu releases); it gets immediately recognized. You may just need to activate it in your sound preferences and in some applications (browser may require a restart).

The Verdict

As of this writing the Samson Meteor is priced at $55 on Amazon. That’s a pretty good deal for a very high quality device.

The wacom intuos drawing tablet is fully supported out of the box on ubuntu and other distros with the xserver-xorg-input-wacom package installed. The tablet is configurable through the xsetwacom command line tool. While the cli tool is not as user friendly as the GUI tool for windows and macOS it is feature complete and can configure the tablet buttons as well as many other settings for the tablet.

The steelseries Apex 350 is a gaming keyboard complete with a numpad, media keys and 22 extra macro keys as well as 5 zones of customizable backlight LEDs.

On Linux all the basic keyboard functions on the steelseries Apex 350 work fine. steelseries provides a program for enabling the extra macro keys and customizing the LED colors. Unfortunately this software is only available for Windows and MacOS however thanks to tuxmark5 there is a tool for using this keyboard to its full extent.

ApexCtl is a command line tool for using the extra functions of the Apex which are not supported out of the box. While this command line tool is more complex than the GUI solution provided by steelseries, ApexCtl is still quite usable for those familiar with the command line.

Conclusion: The steelseries Apex 350 is a nice gaming keyboard which through the use of a 3rd party tool can be completely utilized on Linux.