Pros:

  • The clickety clack is creamy as hell
  • The dial/knob is very useful already
  • I really like the LED effects when I’m typing.
  • The packaging was superb and it just generally looks amazing

Cons:

  • Shipping (unrelated to keyboard):
    • it took 3 weeks to get here
  • Keys / Spacebar
    • It’s quite a high profile position and I find myself double-hitting the spacebar often which appears to have a hare-trigger
    • The spacebar is needlessly long, and my thumb can’t quite reach the Alt or Win key without contorting my hand.
    • On my laptop, the spacebar begins at C and ends at M. Here it starts at X and ends at ,
  • Customization
    • Modifying it in Linux is proving to be painful.
      • The qmk cli requires a full reflash, but no easy way to set macros
      • VIA has easy macros, but has no cli just a shitty Electron app that requires you to set your keyboard permissions to World Accessible for chrome to detect it (which is creepy).
  • Gaming
    • I knew that some keyboards are better for typing and others for gaming, but I did not think the difference would be so big.
    • The arrow keys could be a lot more responsive
    • I’ve never noticed this issue with a normal keyboard.

I guess I love the look and feel of it, but it’s incredibly frustrating to modify as a linux user and I’m making tons of mistakes with it whilst typing.

Is this all normal? Do I eventually get used to it? Or should I send it back and just use a normal $20 keyboard that I can just type and forget about.

  • @tankplanker
    7•1 day ago

    Vial is a big improvement on Via for programmability, gives you access to chords and tap dance, plus I greatly prefer the way it does macros. Plus you can set the permissions down to just the keyboard if you like, has some good instructions on that. Hopefully the pre complied vial firmware is also compiled secure as well as that means the board has to be unlocked by you before vial will work: https://get.vial.today/docs/security.html

    One of my keyboards I waited nearly 3 years for from ordering, lol.

    • @[email protected]
      2•11 hours ago

      Jeez, i thought i had it bad with one group buy at somewhere between 1 and 2 years. What keyboard did you have to wait 3 years for??

      • @tankplanker
        3•8 hours ago

        Equinox XL. Europe buyers had to wait an extra eight to ten months over rest of world due to the European vendor not shipping promptly. The board even went on discount elsewhere before we even got ours lol

          • @tankplanker
            2•6 hours ago

            Yeah it’s wild. I am lucky this one delivered. I have another board that’s at the three year mark and seems to be another year out based on current progress.

            I’ve had three boards completely fail to deliver and one keycap set, all with the runner skipping town. It’s the risk of the GB model.