I am looking for a cool mouse and keyboard for my Linux workstation.
In my case cool means:
top-notch build quality
minimalist design
keyboard is backlit
ideally both the mouse and keyboard are wireless or at least the mouse is
they have some basic programmable buttons.
I know that Corsair and Razer now have a third-party fan-made Linux driver project that kinda/sorta works some of the time but I don’t want to support companies which don’t have native support for Linux.
Roccat offers Linux drivers, but their products are ugly af. Plus the only keyboard that I liked didn’t have a Linux driver for some reason…
Keyboard. Mechanical… Take your pick there are many very minimalist design ones with back lights and wireless and plenty programmable. like layers. You want Qwerty, Dvorak, Coleman, Workman and so on you got it all in one board. Price is the only limiter.
So far the G603 is my favorite wireless mouse. Doesn’t have tons of buttons but at least back and forth. Only thing I am missing is some grippy rubber pads on the sides. I might fix that on mine somehow in the near future.
Also because it is plain standard USB HID you don’t need a driver and that goes for pretty much all mice with five buttons or less. Same thing with keyboards, the only thing you need the drivers for is the lighting stuff really.
I am currently using a Logitech G502 and I am loving the flywheel scroll, so I was thinking about MX Master 2S, but it won’t work on Linux, plus I would really love to support a company that offers native Linux support.
OK, I kinda get that. But personally I see keyboards and mice as driverless things. So what do you mean by support? Driver blobs? Why do you want those for HIDs?
Well I don’t really need them to be driverful, in fact I find it pretty annoying to have a dedicated program sitting in your taskbar just so you can run a mouse. However in my experience without those darn things a lot of the functionality of a mouse like MX Master 2S can remain unavailable. And I am not interested in running a Windows VM just so I can install a mouse program to set my mouse settings. I use some of the programmable buttons a lot.
I’d like to have a numpad. I love that far-right Enter key. However I am willing to settle for TKL if that’s the only possibility. Backlit is a must though.
Not ISO. That is another one all together that is quite uncommon.
Okay. So I have bad news. That complete combination of options is not a thing that exists commercially. Compromises will have to be made. What are you willing to give up? In order of preference and I can see from there.
Sorry this is drawn out. Keyboards are a deep well of options and restrictions.
ISO is the one that has the wider part at the top, the one you linked is the so call “big ass enter key” that is wider overall and even wider at the bottom.
Oh yeah, you are right. Well I like any kind of big Enter button including the UK ISO.
I would like to have backlight, wireless and programmable buttons.
If that’s not possible just backlight + wireless will have to do.
Now that I think of it mechanical is not a must either.
Wireless and backlit is kinda dumb to be honest because backlighting does consume energy all the time. So you end up with either a phone situation of somehow recharging your keyboard every day and you also have to always think about turning it off when you don’t use it or your keyboard will always go out just when you need it.
