What is your personal preference based on experience? I Assume because Mac is Unix and Linux is Unix based, it would be more suited, but I have no personal experience with the layout. I am willing to try something new if i hear enough merits for it, and I also find the windows layout somewhat inadequate(The grass is greener on the other side /s)
I dailydrive Gnome, I am not a programmer, but i am a power user
(On a tangent: Why is gnome so restrictive, it feels like its missing a ton of UI features that are trivial without a boatload of 3rd party extensions that break every update; why doesn’t Win+Shift+number launch a new instance, every other DE does, why doesn’t it?; I don’t use KDE because I just don’t like it, I feel Gnome could be way more if it just natively integrated the extensions ).
aesthetically the windows key annoys me and i hate putting stickers on keyboards; I like how the mac layout looks(My very minimal experience with an in store mac-book has cautioned me away from the fisher-price OS so i don’t know if it is intuitive to use)
Buy an affordable mechanical keyboard instead. I don’t have one, but I tried my cousin’s keyboard for quite some time, and they’re amazing Kalih Red switches, although I would prefer a little bit more of resistance and a bumpy feedback.
What is a good price range to look into?
Keychron goes for about a 100$. You could pick up something cheaper like Redragon, which is around 40$.
Are they worth it(Last long)?
My previous mechanical keyboard lasted about a decade. Or it still works, but I bought a new one because the keycaps had worn so much.
Were the keycaps not replaceable? Or did they include hard to get sizes?
Replaceable sure, but probably not worth it. My new one is a bit nicer, so for that I might do it when the time comes. I still keep the old one around for random occasions I need a keyboard.
I have several perfectly working mechanical keyboards from the 80s, so I’d say, yeah they last long. That being said, I don’t necessarily think you’ll get decades from $40 mechanical keyboard like you can from an old school IBM, Alps, or Cherry MX keyboard. I mean, you may, but these keyboards were most than $40 back then and adjusted for inflation they’d not be cheap these days.
It would be unfair for me to answer this.
If you’re close to a Microcenter, they should have a bunch of “sample” keyboards so you can find the switches you want. Nowadays, you can even build your own keyboard with swappable switches, so you can have different switches for your WASD keys, if you’re into that…