I’m lost in all the choices and don’t know how to decide. I’ve got a first board coming in, supposedly in the next week or two.
It’s a plateless, solder board – hex 4b, that uses oring gasket mount. In retrospect I should have started with hotswap, but too late for that.
I am contemplating which swithces I should get, I don’t type text too much (emails, chats, but no essays or anything like that), I don’t game, but I do a lot of shortcuts in pro audio/video apps 10 hours a day. I’ve got myself a tester, and I love how tactile swithces feel. I have a JWK musetsu in the tester, Tecsee Coral, Durock Koala, and I love them all. I also have a few silent ones, like Boba u4, Gateron silent ink and Bobbagum, and they all feel really mushy to me. U4 is also much less tactile than the other tactile switches.
Someone told me though that newbs always prefer extremes – the most tactile, the most silent one, etc. I am slightly worried that using tactile switches dayly would get exhausting. Up until now I only used keyboards in apple’s macbooks and apple magic keyboard which are all some shape of scissor mechanism over a rubber dome. I quite enjoy the topre-like rumle these keys make, I guess it’s a muted, quiet low-pitch thock?
I also have toddler twins that I do not want to disturb with loud typing too much. So I was thinking to get a quiet switch that is not mushy/silent, but is a linear that has no loud clack.
So far my list of switches to try is as follows:
Mx blacks,
Gateron Black Ink,
Lavenders,
Momoka Frogs,
Kailh Midnight Pro,
Turquoise tealios,
Aqua Kings,
Durock POM.
If I had to get switches right now I’d go for Musetsu – lowest pitch of all I’ve tried in my tester.
But I am also not sure what’s the best way to decide between all of them. It’s not realistic to buy 80 of each, lube all and try them out. I can afford to buy a few of each and try how they sound in same positions in my board without soldering them, but again, that woudl be different from normal use.
How do I approach this?