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Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

Whilst I get your point - you might want to tone down the rhetoric slightly...

I'm a mechanical keyboard aficionado - I've gone through everything from Das, to Annes, to WhiteFoxes, to Keychrons. (Yes, I did solder some of those...lol).

My current daily driver is a Keychron K6 - but even I am seriously considering this Logitech.

The spec sheet promises a battery life of 10 months (no backlight) - the Keychron K6 is fine - except that the battery life sucks, and it takes 3-4 seconds to wake up from sleep every time.

I'm looking for a QMK wireless keyboard, but they're thin on the ground - and I suspect the battery life would still be terrible.

At the end of the day, companies like Logitech (or Apple) have the time and engineering nous to test things, and have them Just Work. Things like decent battery life, or having fast wake-from-sleep would probably be handled by their engineering teams.

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> I'm looking for a QMK wireless keyboard, but they're thin on the ground

The issue with wireless keyboards and QMK is that Bluetooth is such a messed up protocol and to implement it QMK would realistically have to deal with proprietary binary blobs which they choose not to. I heard there's some work on "custom" 2.4GHz transmission modes but that's not as universal or ubiquitous as Bluetooth is.

Maybe check out ZMK, basically a QMK for wireless keyboards but more opiniated. I'm about to build a wireless corne with it after years on a wired QMK Planck.

Battery life for closed source keyboards made by big companies will always be better because they have the resources to perfectly engineer the hardware and code for every model and the willingness to cut lots of corners in terms of customizability. Same with any other piece of hardware.

I'd personally prefer some form of wireless which is specifically not Bluetooth. For one, I'm typing this on an old desktop that doesn't have BT of any kind and I don't want to have a dedicated keyboard for choosing my OS (I sometimes use windows on this computer).

Also, sometimes there's noticeable lag when typing on a BT keyboard (I have experience with an older Apple keyboard on an MBP and with a Keychron). I've never had such issues with either of my MS sculpt keyboard or Logitech mice and keyboards (nor with my Logitech lightspeed mice which are amazing, but I realize that's something else).

> I'm looking for a QMK wireless keyboard, but they're thin on the ground - and I suspect the battery life would still be terrible.

QMK's bluetooth stack is pretty fucking broken and has limited chipsets it supports. You'll have more luck with https://github.com/jpconstantineau/BlueMicro_BLE or https://github.com/zmkfirmware/zmk

> The spec sheet promises a battery life of 10 months (no backlight) - the Keychron K6 is fine - except that the battery life sucks, and it takes 3-4 seconds to wake up from sleep every time.

Turn off sleep. There's a key combo to do it (at least, there was on my model). It has such a small effect on battery life that I have no idea why they default to making it go to sleep like every two minutes of inactivity.

I do sometimes look at my mouse that's also bluetooth and runs on a single AA battery for months, and wonder WTF Keychron's doing wrong with power management. Oh well, at least it can work plugged-in, too. And it was cheap.

I've seen dongles you can buy (I think in the $30-$50 range) that sit between your normal non-QMK keyboard and your computer. Then when you press a key, the dongle takes the keycodes from your keyboard, runs them through QMK, and everything works like your keyboard had QMK to begin with.

This is probably the route I'd go for a wireless board. I'd likely choose a keyboard that really has the wireless part down (Logitech is a decent option here, I think - the experience with their receiver is better than Bluetooth for input devices in my experience) and then run it through one of those dongles if I really wanted wireless.

You would think. The most annoying piece of hardware I have is a Microsoft wireless mouse which, while it's physically fine, goes to sleep very quickly and takes roughly a second to wake up when you move it. It's pretty much unusable as a result. Which is disappointing, because MS hardware generally is pretty good, but I guess everyone misses sometimes.

> guess everyone misses sometimes.

It's still strange to me how companies like Microsoft and Logitech can still regularly produce lemons after, what, 15 years of optical mouse production. It's not like anything fundamentally changes any more, they should have a winning set of virtually perfect devices that cover the entire market with interlocking segments by now.

I guess they're going for the "make it bit shit on purpose so we can sell them another mouse in 2 years" strategy.

Or maybe they just cannot help themselves from penny pinching good products into bad products so continually that you don't even know which are which any more (and you certainly can't tell if the expensive models are actually better or not).

I guess it's good that they're leaving market gaps open for the little guys?

>because MS hardware generally is pretty good

After a couple years of supporting Surface devices, I have very different views in this regard.

I was more thinking peripherals. The Natural keyboard line and their cheap mice were always just rock solid. Admittedly I've not been in the market for them for a while so I don't know what the latest models are like, but I did find the irony that a software company's best products were its hardware ones rather delicious.

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