I have had a few that were very weakly soldered in, but the fine once they reflowed

It’s more the absence of feeling, I am used to the scratch or ping of even a good leaf of a mechanical switch, this is like super smooth. Decent job of lubing these from the factory helps.

The green dragons are also very light bottom out and a very short stem so you bottom them out a lot, so its super super smooth then the bottom out event.

Bonus shot of most of my other v4n4g0ns

Appreciate the offer, will come back to you if I dont like these hall effect switches I picked up for my new board thats coming next week

Just make that ergo hotswap and its a lot easier to play around with different switch builds.

Switch collecting/modding does pander towards hording tendencies, I have thousands of switches that are in jars so I stopped buying new ones till I cleared out some of my back log.

I normally order extra with whatever GB I picked up the board from. I only use 40% keyboards, so it tends to be rare that they are freely available in a keyboard shop, least of all the UK. Last one I remember was monorail, I purchased three of v1 (direct) and v2 (mechboards) each.

Sometimes you get third parties making new versions that are often re-imagined layouts for the same board or a continuation of an out of print board, for both see monorail for both. Some of the fun ones convert an existing layout into something else, like the wolfjaw xl for the equinox xl. They tend to be advertised by the 40% discord.

If you like a common layout like 60% they tend to be a lot easier to find, as long as its not been heavily customized. Mechboards have a bunch in stock right now

Board I am using today its Moyu Blacks/Dark Jades with I think 55g progressive springs from Spirt, but I built this board a while ago so I might have put in a slightly different weight. As I like the sound a lot and they represented good value I purchased several batches of these and I have at least five or six PCBs built with them, its fairly typical for me to have more than one PCB per keyboard case.

Very tactile switches and I really enjoy the bottom out sound of these, they are very loud for tactiles and will not be for everyone.

Favorites I have built are either some zealios I put in a long stem and progressive spring or some primekbs (smokes with red stem) that are ball bearing modded. I really like that utlra clacky nature of these three switches.

Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.

I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

Via is trash for any deep customisation, I massively prefer vial although you have to recompile the firmware for it. Vial does look like ass mind you

Yeah sadly so much of the keeb space is locked within

I’m sad to say best way to find the ones close to you will be your local keeb discord, as painfulas discord is. UK it’s limited to prototypist meet ups or the main UK discord.

Anything that supports either Via or preferably VIAL is fully configurable in Linux (and windows). Both use QMK firmware for the keyboards, although it has to be compiled to support either Via or VIAL, this is usually done for you. QMK is open source, so a nice fit for Linux and device longevity.

I believe a large chunk of Keychrons support Via with a firmware flash, but I haven’t tried those.

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.

Go to a meet up if you can and try out different boards, switches, key cap profiles, talk to owners etc. before you spend any significant sums. Impact of key cap profile and materials is often underrated.

If you cant then switch testers and “cheap” 3d printed or acrylic boards are a decent way to try different layouts, especially if you can sell them once you finished with them. Sure you can skip this step if you know the exact layout you want, but I didn’t.

Learn what types of switches you prefer, if you like them lubed, filmed, ball bearing mod, stem swapped, etc. is worth the effort. As is getting good at stabs.

I think another fundamental is deciding if you are one and done or you will keep buying boards. Buying keyboards then building them is the hobby for me, I have loads, more than 50. If its the former then you want to spend longer nailing down what you want, the latter it doesn’t matter so much.

Its snobby but mass market boards are ok, just ok. I would much rather have something more premium, with a bit more thought around it. It is more risk than buying from your average shop though, and you need to do proper research into the GB runner, even then they can exit scam (ask me how I know).

Being able to decide everything you want for a board, mounting style, plate material (or even no plate), switches, how they lubed, if they filmed, what stabs you use, what keycaps, all make fundamental differences to a boards sound and behavior. Getting that how you want it can take time.

Another starship user. Mostly want it to summarise useful stuff for folders pulled from git or whatever so it’s pretty plain rest of the time. I use the same on all my boxes

Borg daily to the local drive then copied across to a USB drive, then weekly to cloud storage. Script is triggered by daily runs of topgrade before I do any updates

Ive said repeatedly that its certain to be an issue with their setup I have even provided proof that its not typical.

Its just a terminal applies to pretty much every type of application. There are lightweight WM, text editors, terminals, etc. etc. for a reason.

I can run my current setup with its 2 different animated 4k wallpapers and all the over shit I have running on my old 4800u that is only slightly slower and it consumes an insane amount of CPU at idle. Just because you can does not mean you should.

Its six years old, that’s starting to get on a bit now for a processor that was never anywhere near top of the line from AMD when it was new.

I think if you are trying to bling our your desktop and not expecting it to impact performance from an older, less powerful setup then generally speaking you are going to have a bad time. You should be pitching your desktop experience based on what your hardware can handle, there are plenty of terminal options available depending on what you need, just like there are plenty of WM/DMs if you have a lower spec machine.

Having said that, it was pretty damn obvious that there something wrong with ghostty on their setup, and its misleading to say that ghostly is just bad because of that.

Its a bit slower than Alacritty for my use case, not massively enough, but enough to put me off. The extra functionality such as its TMUX stuff I just do not need. I think if you want a more fully featured terminal, particularly if you do a lot of code writing in the terminal, then I would pick Kitty.

I only really do quick remote editing in the console so its not important for me, and I do not want TMUX as I use a tiling WM. Terminal launch speed is particularly important to me because of this.

I haven’t tried foot yet, that is meant to be good for wayland and as I use Sway it might be better fit. I would need to get frustrated with Ghostty before I could be bothered to switch, which is what happened to me with Alacritty over image support, shallow as that sounds.