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
Cand ends atM. Here it starts atXand 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).
- Modifying it in Linux is proving to be painful.
- 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.
Other than customization, which honestly will always be cumbersome, it sounds like your issues are with the key caps, switches, and layout. I suspect you will get used to the lay out, but I have no patience for switches or caps I don't like. Normally, I'd say that you should just swap out the key caps and/or switches and most of the problems you mention go away, but the Q1 has a far less common layout so that makes replacing the key caps more of an issue. I am not a fan of the stock caps on the Keychron either and I'd have already had replacement caps lines up if I bought one.
In the end, the Q1 is expensive enough that if you are not liking it, I'd return it and get something else. There is no way I'd personally go for a "regular keyboard" (by which I assume you mean a cheap rubber dome keyboard), but I'd probably get one that had a more standard layout and maybe something a little smaller since you are used to using a laptop.