Re-forging sockets and color sockets?

How does it work? I've tried it and it seems completely random, so just checking if i'm missing anything here, because those orbs are kinda rare to find and it seems stupid to constantly waste them on trying to achieve the desired links or color sockets.
sometimes these orbs can make your gear unusable and then you might as well throw that gear out and since loot is pathetic good luck trying to find anything else decent

To clarify, a piece a strength based gear is MUCH more likely to roll red sockets than green or blue, whereas an int/dex based piece of gear is going to have a hard time rolling red sockets.

Also, if you find an item lying on the ground with 3 linked sockets, one red, one green, one blue, and vendor it, itll give you a chromatic orb. They tend to become much more common as you progress in the game as well. Once you get to the endgame its fairly easy to trade with players for the orbs you need, so just stick it out. While the difficulty of the game increases enormously as you progress, the crafting system actually gets quite a bit easier to manage.

Correct, they are completely random. It's very possible to spend X number of chrom or fusing and end up some something worse than you started with- it's all RNG. How sockets and links are rolled is very similar.

Some tips:

* Getting 3-link (or 3 socket) is relatively easy, but expect to spend a lot of orbs for 4L or higher. As such I try to avoid fusing anything beyond 3L until late or end game- and even then only on awesome rares.

* Use white items with the desired link count and alch them. Using the vendor recipe chroms are fairly common so don't worry too much about the colors if you need to change them (as long as they reasonably aligned with the item type).

* You can trade for whites with good link counts fairly cheaply (a fusing or two), much less than it would take to make one.