System76 Open Source Hotswap Mechanical Keyboard

Marketplace Sharing fun finds
83

I just want to say I do appreciate many on the System76’s team attempting to reach out to the community, even if some of it may have been misguided. The attempt and communication is an important start because that demonstrates care.

I can definitely understand this confusion and frustration because it undoubtedly is both. The community isn’t a monolith. In fact we have many niche communities in our niche. This is typically a very difficult part to connect with and understand for many companies trying to come from outside the hobby and make their way in.

For example, the 40s niche isn’t well regarded in certain circles. It starts with people disliking the layout and evolves when certain people took that personally. Boards like ergodox aren’t exactly loved, but they aren’t hated. They just aren’t talked about as they’re typically no longer in the general headspace of split keyboards that “matter”. People that have and enjoy ergodoxes don’t go trying to convert people to ergodoxes, ergo people don’t hate ergodoxes.

Honestly as someone who works on and covers keyboard news as a small scale creator, the System76 wasn’t really on my radar. It’s easier to ridicule a board if we don’t have a user behind it and assume it’s just some faceless company cranking out a product to hit some checkboxes. Heck even I took a silly shot at the wording about people transferring footage from their keyboard as a video editor myself :joy: .

I’m happy there is demand for it, which means there may be your own niche within this niche of a hobby that can appreciate where you all are coming from. There are other groups like custom keyboard enthusiasts who care about certain aesthetic features. There are groups who care about detailed switch modding. There are groups who care about hand crafted artisans. Certain groups may not like features that other groups enjoy, and that’s okay.

This brings a lot of variety in our community and our hobby, but of course that could bring a lot of friction depending on people and how things are received. It’s always a bit harder to truly understand someone behind a screen than it would have been at a meetup. I’ve had my disagreements online with a plethora of people over a variety of issues, but when it comes to the actual people behind the screens, most everyone is nice and reasonable. I’ve hosted over a half dozen keyboard meetups with attendance reaching over 500 people at certain meetups and while people may not like what you like, people can still understand. It’s about understanding it’s okay if people don’t like something, even if they’re vocal about it.

While there has been some vitriol on both sides, I hope that everything can be taken constructively, and with at least some semblance of understanding. Not liking or even insulting a product isn’t the same as not liking or insulting an individual. We understand you and your team has put a lot of work into the product and want to stand by it, but it’s very natural in this hobby to express our likes and dislikes. The key thing to remember is that doesn’t reflect on how we feel about you, but the product (unless you’ve actually offended someone and they don’t like you).

I could go on and on and on and on about the complex sociocultural circumstances in our community, but I hope I’ve gotten a point in there somewhere that matters.

Cheers to everyone, I hope all y’all are having a great Friday :slight_smile:

Edit: Edits for grammar because wording articulately is hard.

15 Likes
84

This may be true broadly but I really just want to jump in to say it is absolutely untrue about KeebTalk. This is a small community and the people here are generally incredibly respectful and kind.

I also think this is important. Whoever sent this thread to the System76 team, I think, did so in bad faith. If the team had started a thread asking for feedback or criticism I’m sure the folks here would have been happy to share opinions in a much more respectful and constructive way. But this thread was basically just a bunch of people poking fun (perhaps harshly) at a product they stumbled upon that, for many of them, embraces a design that doesn’t align with their interests.
I don’t think people were thinking that the System76 team would be reading the thread and certainly didn’t think they were providing constructive feedback about the design.

13 Likes
85

Yes, exactly this. The original intent of this thread was a what are those kind of thing, very tongue-in-cheek, though a lot of us that first saw it did have quite a few head scratching moments. One of the things I find disappointing about the way this situation turned out is the fact that I have massive amounts of respect for how accessible the System76 team has made a lot of things in the Linux world. It would have been incredible to see an Interest Check thread show up here or geekhack and see what board we would have gotten from that.

Though I can understand and appreciate the stance that it’s a board built by System76 for System76ers. Would just have been awesome to see two communities come together and not clash. The reciprocal feedback could have done great things. Hopefully we can all get on the same page and that can still happen.

12 Likes
86

Sadly, that link you posted includes many misnomers about the design of the keyboard, particularly the electrical design. I already addressed that in a comment before on this forum. But I expect it to continue to come up.

1 Like
87

As for the electrical design, let me tell you that designing a working 4-port 10Gbps USB hub inside a keyboard is no simple task and a lot of PCB designers in this community would not be able to do it at all.

Now you seem personnally affected by the various saying on your baby and I am sorry about that.

You look to be young and not fully used to public reactions yet.
I experienced the same exact thing for my first job and it continued all my career.

I now work on hardware and software that end in the hand of millions of people and can tell that everytime I hear bad critics on my work, sometimes harsh comments, sometimes justified and sometimes not.
So I stay positive by saying if the product sells well I did not do that bad of a job after all.

You’ll also get used to that eventually.

And did I say you can’t please everyone no matter what you do?

2 Likes
88

This is hardly my first rodeo, don’t patronize me. I’m more interested in why the enthusiast keyboard community in particular seems to have such strong opinions about technical things while seeming not to fully understand them, like electrical design. And these opinions are then amplified in ways I haven’t seen when working in firmware or software.

89

Yes, this is the case. A lot of professional electrical engineers struggle with designs like this.

Not my baby. One of the projects I have worked on, and far from the biggest one. Many of them receive criticism, few like this.

Not accurate, and patronizing.

You might want to reconsider your career choice if public reactions are as bad as what happened in this thread. I’ve had plenty of product releases in my career, with none attracting the same kind of criticism.

So do I. Again, few as bad as in this thread.

Fine. The interactions here have had little to no effect on my mood or positivity.

I already have been doing this for a long time, and am already used to this. Why would you assume otherwise?

Especially with keyboards, it seems.

90

Keebtalk is one of the least toxic keyboard spaces you’ll find. I find it perplexing that an outsider might come into this space with such self-righteousness and criticism for its members.

17 Likes
91

This has not been my experience, but I am open to being proven wrong. I’ll be sticking around here, to watch and learn.

1 Like
92

Agreed. We were just fine in our happy little corner of the multiverse discussing how ugly this keyboard is until someone got all pissy.

2 Likes
93

I’m over it now. I’ll just read, and wait. And respond if directly mentioned.

1 Like
94

Haha!
You are right, sorry about that, this is often what grown up people tend to do :stuck_out_tongue:

If you were used to that, you would not continue posting here hoping to grab more acceptance because you would know it would not happen.
The hard truth is that in the end sales matter and the opinions of the people who actually purchased your keyboard.
If people who purchased your keyboard are happy with it, is it not the best thing that could happen to you and your team ?

PS:
Will not answer to your more aggressive comments :stuck_out_tongue:

8 Likes
95

It’s more than done.
It’s just a show for twitter now.

1 Like
96

Well I wouldn’t go that far, lol. Plenty of people, including myself, love their Ergodoxen deeply. But I think I know what you’re getting at. Upon seeing the Ergodox, people can quickly make a decision about whether it will work for them or not. If not, they just say, “That’s just not for me,” and move on. I guess that’s just the reaction I was hoping for from people who didn’t like the layout, rather than the… everything else.

2 Likes
97

We recently topped 2K views for this thread, that is quite a lot for a single thread on this forum.
Publicity, bad or good, is always good for business :wink:

1 Like
98

Damn, don’t have Twitter :rofl:

99

I was actually interested in the keyboard. This thread has put me right off it.

3 Likes
100

Least toxic? Perhaps. Pretty low bar imo lol

1 Like
101

I commented a while back that some of the modifier sizes might have been reduced in order to limit the number of stabilizers (this is not a criticism, I hate stabs and i’d prefer never to have use them) but I see that the actual purpose was to be able to allow modularity so that users of the board could swap out modifiers almost at will. I’m all for modularity and if this were a software design application I can see why you wouldn’t want to create special cases (meaning sticking with 4-5 layouts when you could support n^5 or 5^n layouts).

I am curious though, if you don’t mind talking about it, what sort of key swapping your test users did and preferred? Swapping the key to the left of “A” between Caps, CTRL and Fn makes perfect sense and it pretty common I think. But did anyone swap out the traditional “Enter” spot for another key? I ask because that seems to have been kept 1.5u (hope I’m getting the key widths right) where it could have apparently been 1.75u and been right-aligned with the right side of the cluster.

Similarly I think that you made the Left Shift a 2u so that it could be swapped into either of the Spacebar slots but it looks like you’re providing an extra 2u Shift anyways (otherwise what would people do in the left shift spot when they move the shift down to space). Was there anyone who put a different key on left shift? It seems like that could have been extended to 2.25u if no one wanted to swap Left Shift for another key.

I think most people here sympathize that you worked hard on something and saw it being criticized here and made light of. I think it’s worth noting though, as someone else said, that this was not posted by a designer or something so there wasn’t really an expectation that criticizing or making light of the board would be seen by someone who made it.

Overall, to add to Man of Interests point above: many people here are very focused on the aesthetics of boards and there really aren’t too many designs you see that don’t have the main cluster vertically aligned on the edges (at least along the majority of the cluster, I’m ignoring hhkb and “exploded” arrow clusters). Alice-like designs are an obvious one but they are “uniformly variable” and do not really have any alignment at all while the Launch is partially aligned and the entire shape of it seems to “expect” vertical alignment. I really think that if the “cluster” were aligned on both sides that it would be a different story.

5 Likes
102

Originally, we had two prototypes. One was a split ortho design, the other was a staggered design.

For the staggered design, we essentially started with the Drop ALT layout. The function row was added back in, the spacebar was split, and the navigation keys moved up one row. The spacebar was reduced in size, and we added in a Fn key on the left side and a ctrl key on the right to make up for this. This looked pretty similar to some laptop layouts, not going against the grain at all.

Our split ortho design was essentially 2u spacebar keys at the bottom, 1.5u modifiers on the left side of the left split, right side of the right split, and 1u keys on the rest of it. In rectangular grids.

We noticed a few things. This is perhaps just opinion, but it is what we thought. It was far easier to reason about remapping on the split ortho keyboard. Most keycaps could be moved most places, and when remapping, seeing the keyboard can help users quite a lot to learn a new layout. Blank caps are not for everyone. But for most of us, it was still far easier to type on the staggered keyboard. It takes quite some time to learn an ortholinear layout.

This is where Launch got weird. We made layout changes to facilitate swapping most keycaps, while not requiring users to learn new key positions. We reduced it to 3 sizes: 1u, 1.5u, and 2u. We tested this layout in many prototypes, with small iterations, to accommodate for a wide set of users. They could all use the keyboard without having to learn a new layout, but could also easily reconfigure it in a way that makes learning the changes easy.

These are anecdotal findings. I get that. But the team that designed this has spent many years (decades?) using different mechanical keyboards, from the trusty IBM Model M with those sweet buckling spring switches, to the ErgoDox split ortho, the Planck 40% ortho, to hand built keyboards of all shapes and sizes. It was easy to feel what Launch offered when using it, and in the end, that was what mattered.

A keyboard, for the person using it, is the most powerful tool on the planet. It connects them to the modern world in a transformative way. This is why these arguments happen. When we find the perfect keyboard, everything else seems - kind of insane. But to someone else, something completely different is their perfect keyboard. Launch is my perfect keyboard. It probably is not yours. And that is fine with me

11 Likes