If you are planning to buy or just now bought a new mechanical keyboard, congratulations!! you are part of a cult now. Now if you are like me, who overthinks a lot before buying anything and looked at more than 48h of Mechanical keyboard ASMR & reviews then you might have ended up on some big brand names like Keychron, Ducky, GMMK, etc.

I ended up on Ducky considering the current COVID situation, china ban, crazy customs, and limited availability. This is less of a guide and more of the steps I had to take to make my new Ducky One 2 SF white (cherry reds) usable for me.

Quality

If you have worked on a membrane keyboard, then you are in for a surprise when you first take the keyboard in your hands. The quality looks great. I can feel the weight of the keycaps & they feel amazing on your finger-tips. You might think that the plastic base is cheap and so, but you won’t in the case of Ducky at least. There is minor flex in the middle but hey you aren’t hammering the keyboard, you will be typing on it & they won’t flex at all even for heavy users. The USB provided is of good quality as well, though I ended up using only the 15% length of it.

Key-switches

This is just how I felt when using red keys, they seem to go down a lot, I mean they do register somewhere in the middle, but you don’t feel that middle and end up bottom-out on almost every keypress. This might not be the case if you choose any other key but I am still glad that I choose red for their smoothness (I was almost in for brown but the community changed my mind).

Height is abnormal

Yes, I am still not very comfortable with the height of the mechanical keyboard or particulary my keyboard. It gives strain to my wrist if I type for more than 20 minutes. That is a deal-breaker, but for some reasons, I couldn’t get my fingers off it. As a solution, I am using few folds of cardboard that the keyboard came in, with an out cover with foam for not absorbing sweat. When the lockdown ends in my city I will go get a wooden one crafted, since the height needs to be adjusted permanently and not via foam or cushion but a real thing so that my wrist isn’t the air hovering. You should listen to u/andreopile here, he’s a helpful guy in mkindia.

MacOS

When you plug-in it will work out of the box, no changes required. But after a few days you might notice that it hangs up & takes no input at all. This happens whenever there’s an auto-update on mac. I haven’t seen any such issues with windows or linux, but even Ducky says they aren’t fully compatible with MacOS. So to mitigate this, you might look at some posts that ask you to change VID & move on with your journey but that doesn’t with a price. With that, the warranty of your keyboard will be nullified as stated by many moderators and Ducky itself. What essentially you will end up doing is faking a product ID that looks like an apple keyboard & this process also requires you to activate switch 3 in the back. After that, you might want to change the position of Command & options key to something like this.

Hope this little rant/guide/review helps you.

Peace. :q