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.
Keychron goes for about a 100$. You could pick up something cheaper like Redragon, which is around 40$.
My recommendation? No. Don’t.
I’m an ex Windows user, current Linux and Mac user. Keyboard shortcuts on Linux are much closer to Windows conventions compared to macOS. I wouldn’t recommend using a Mac keyboard with Linux. I’d only recommend it if you want to use both Linux and macOS with the same keyboard (you will be happier in this case, because using macOS with a Windows keyboard sucks, vice versa).
If you don’t like the Windows key design, get a keyboard with a custom one.
The Mac keyboard layout was largely inherited from the Apple ][ and pre-OSX systems, which were non-Unix. The original Unix keyboard layout differs from both Mac and Windows layouts.
No? Those keyboards aren’t even all that great. Why not just buy a mechanical one and call it a day?
Also, what’s wrong with the super key? Especially considering it’s also used in Linux
I’ve dabbled with Linux on Mac hardware a couple of times and I’ve got to say that Linux DEs generally hew closer to Windows conventions than Mac ones and I found using the Mac keyboard with Linux to be a dreadful experience without the fact that the chiclet keyboards are the worst shit I’ve ever put my fingers on.
I very quickly snagged a standard mechanical qwerty 104 key with brown switches and cursed every moment that I had to use that abominable keyboard built into the stupid MacBook. Apple seems determined to do things different for the sake of different as much as they possibly can and trying to adapt all their nonsense to the Win/Lin way of doing things made my life worse in numerous ways (most DEs have great remapping for keys and such, but it gets messy fast if you’ve got apps from different paradigms.)
I’d very much recommend against going out of your way to get a Mac keyboard for using Linux unless you enjoy fighting against things. But hey, if that’s your kink, then a Mac keyboard with Linux would be my recommended way to go.
