New Keyboard

Having had such a long hiatus, I decided to wait until I had something really important to talk about.

Well, after a few days of deliberation and research, I finally purchased my first mechanical keyboard, the Steelseries 6GV2.

What is a mechanical keyboard?

A normal keyboard contains a membrane made out of rubber or some other malleable material, on which there are contact points corresponding to each key. When the contact point is pressed against the circuit board below it, a key press is registered. The plastic keys are then mounted on top of their respective contact points on the membrane, and basically, this is your everyday keyboard. (I realize I’ve omitted a lot of detail of course).

The plus side of such a membrane-type of keyboard is that it costs much less to manufacture and is probably quicker to mass produce. The downside is that, since the membrane is continuous, one can imagine a key press slightly distorting the membrane around it. When there is significant button-mashing going on during a video game session or even quick typing, some key presses can be lost or duplicated as a result. Furthermore, a membrane such as this has a limited number of key strokes it can take before the keyboard is rendered useless. Again, since the membrane is continuous, one needs to replace the entire keyboard when one or two keys lose their resolution. A normal keyboard can probably take about 5 million key strokes per key.

A mechanical keyboard is built such that every key is independent. It achieves this by mounting each key on its own electronic, sprung switch. Most switches are made by a company known as Cherry. In this way, if one key gets worn out, it is easy to replace the switch underneath. Also, since each key is spring-loaded, it is usually not necessary to have to bash the key down all the way for the keystroke to register. On my keyboard, as I get used to it, I find I’m putting in only about half the effort into each key press and I can feel my typing speed visibly improve. Also, this keyboard is rated at 50 million keystrokes per key. If I actually hit that limit, I can just replace the switches!

The Steelseries also has the basic multimedia keys and boasts an incredible build quality. The plastic case is iron-infused which does make the beast quite heavy but hey, they tout this as the last keyboard I’m ever going to have to buy, so it better last!

Why am I writing this?

For me, it was either going to be this Steelseries 6GV2 or the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate.

There are countless videos and written reviews out there that better explain the concept of the Cherry mechanical switch and compare different mechanical keyboards. I went through a lot of these websites and videos and was still thoroughly confused. At first glance, it appears as though the Steelseries lacks the features of the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate (its closest rival, really). For instance, the latter keyboard is backlit and has macro recording features that are perfect for certain types of games. My keyboard on the other hand looks very unassuming in comparison.

What the other sites and videos were not answering, however, was my burning question about how these keyboards would work under GNU/Linux. Did they need random extra Windows-only drivers, for instance?

Having purchased this keyboard, I can safely tell the GNU users out there that the Steelseries 6GV2 just plain WORKS out of the box on Ubuntu. Razer keyboards are known to have issues with Ubuntu since they need all kinds of extra drivers to unlock the functionality (macro recording, mainly). I’ve heard of horror stories with the Razer Lycosa series (not mechanical) where the media buttons would suddenly go crazy and skip through music or adjust the volume randomly. This Steelseries is simply plug and play, and the multimedia keys work out of the box!

There are of course other mechanical keyboards out there, such as the Das Keyboard, Deck, ThermalTake (supposedly a dressed up Steelseries – can someone confirm?), but for the cost and build quality, I think I made the best decision in picking up this Steelseries. Leave a comment below if you have had good/bad experiences with other mechanical keyboards on Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distros!