Keychron Q1 "gasket-mount" 75%

Keychron. I like the idea of a brass weight (the GMMK Pro founders edition has one) and I like the barebones and fully built options. Overall Keychron seems business-savvy without being gimmicky or exploitative. They provide good value for your money in my experience. QMK support and hotswap ability in a higher-quality board would make this a great option to recommend to new folks.

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I’ve always wondered about this. As far as I know, it’s been “not good” for quite some time. Are there plans by the QMK team (or random people contributing) to improve QMK’s functionality with BT or is there a limitation with QMK that makes it difficult to improve BT usability :thinking:

From what I understand, Neuron v2 will have Bluetooth support via QMK. https://www.reddit.com/r/mechmarket/comments/nm8e98/ic_neuron_v2_a_bluetooth_polycarbonate_40/

I have no other knowledge on the subject, but I will be VERY interested to see BT support in QMK get better.

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This will help with the chicken-or-egg situation we are currently in where boards don’t come with BT radios because QMK support is weak, but the QMK project isn’t incentivized to prioritize this work because so few QMK-compatible boards come equipped with BT radios.

According to the ZMK documentation, the shortcomings in QMK include a lack of support for BT Low Energy or the ability to pair with multiple devices. Also, ZMK has more robust power management capabilities in general. Partly this is due to Zephyr, the real-time operating system it is based on.

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As things stand I’d go with the GMMK Pro. I like the knob, and I don’t want to have to choose between a knob and an End key. I like the fact that the Keychron doesn’t have the glowey sides though, just a better look.

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It is my understanding that the difference between QMK and ZMK in this regard comes down to software licensing; QMK is published with a license that essentially asks for all contributed code to be open-sourced, while ZMK is published with a license that allows some contributed code to not be open-sourced.

Many bluetooth (especially newer more-cutting-edge) modules appear to not have open-source drivers, which effectively means the support QMK can offer for them on-board is limited in ways ZMK’s support is not. Remedying this would require people (either in the production side or the open-source community) to spend time writing open-source drivers for those modules, and is unlikely as a result. So it’s sort-of a dual limitation; one on QMK’s end (which is arguably defensible, in that the project intends to offer the community a fully open-source firmware with no mystery code) and one on the broader end of hardware manufacturing and driver development (to not provide open-source drivers, which is also defensible but obviously holds back the breadth of their potential usage).

Of course, this is just my understanding and it is quite possible that I am wrong!

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