I'm back in my home town and working from my office (not remote home office) for a few weeks, and after a few days of typing on the god-awful Dell keyboard there (and some severe and worsening cramping and wrist pain) I remembered why I originally bought the mech keyboard I now have at the home office. So as an emergency solution I went and bought the cheapest decent-seeming keyboard I could get my hand on without shipping (which is
slow in Norway):
NOK 400 (~€38/$45, includes 25% VAT), NOS C250 wired mechanical 60% keyboard. I could have found a cheap membrane keyboard for NOK150 that would probably have been miles better than the Dell, but this seemed like a decent deal. It's the store brand for gaming peripherals for Elkjøp/Elgiganten/Gigantti/Elko (Norway/Sweden+Denmark/Finland/Iceland), and for the price it seems rather impressive. No doubt a rebranded no-name OEM product, but build quality seems good (no creaks or poor fitment), there's no keycap wobble to speak of, the larger keys are decently stabilized, and noise is ... fine. A bit hollow, but fine for what it is. Keycaps are from what I can tell doubleshot shine-through ABS (and you can see they love to pick up fingerprints), the font is decent even if the top-mounted LEDs don't diffuse properly into the secondary and tertiary labels. Switches are an MX Red copy made by Content. I've never used linear switches for any extended time before, and I generally prefer tactile switches, but ... these aren't bad. Definitely not up to the taste levels of mech key enthusiasts (pretty scratchy), but they're consistent enough across they board that I can't make out any glaringly over/underweight ones, and overall the typing experience is perfectly adequate.
The negatives are much more down to the 60% layout and some nit-picks: I really miss Home and End keys (and some would no doubt miss PgUp and PgDn), and it'll probably take me more time than I'm actually spending here for now to adjust to the need for FN key combos for everything from arrow keys to Delete and Esc. I would also have liked a detachable cable - though I guess a fixed braided cable (feels like decent quality) is better than a cheap, shitty micro-B one with a fragile connector.
Considering it would have cost me twice as much to move up to the second cheapest option (at which point I would have been solidly in Keychron wireless keyboard territory, so ... eh, no thanks), this seems like a good compromise use when I'm back here. And if it saves me weeks of sick leave recovering from the dirt-poor ergonomics of that Dell keyboard, it's more than worth it.
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