Keychron Q10 (Alice Layout) QMK Custom Mechanical Keyboard

This keyboard is fantastic and Keychron customer service has been amazing. This is my second mechanical keyboard and in every way it is years ahead of the Logitech mechanical that I’d tried. Switching to an Alice layout has been great for my wrist pain and I have no complaints about this keyboard. I did switch out the keycaps for cherry profile and switched to cherry speed silver switches. What should you expect? It is thicker and heavy. Some of you guys like that. I’m a low profile guy but I NEED an Alice layout for wrist pain. I lightened the build by 12 ounces by switching out the center layer and also upgraded the foam. It feels lighter and fantastic. It also sounds great.

It’s not perfect for me, but it’s a perfectly built piece of gear. Due to wrist injuries I would prefer a lower and lighter board, and just a half inch of play can make a big difference for me, which is why I just bought the low profile Alice Q11. The Q-10 will be used at home where I type very little and use a ton of macros.

Pros: via support, high attack/melee damage, so many options for all the layers, ergonomics, SUPERB build quality, nerd cred, left handed knob (frees up mouse hand)
Cons: on the heavy side, may not suit first timers used to laptops and slim low-profile Logitechs, might be a bit of a high bar for a first time mechanical user

I've had this keyboard for a couple of weeks now and I absolutely love it. It's my first time trying an Alice layout and I think it's definitely more ergonomic than my traditional keyboard. I saw a YouTube review of the Q10 complaining about the "cheap" keycaps, but to be honest, they feel fantastic to me. They have a really pleasant typing sound as well. The feedback on the brown switches is exactly where I expect it to be. I may eventually try to hot-swap some linear switches in here, but for now this is truly great. Key customization is an absolute breeze and the macro keys are very handy. I have nothing bad to say about this keyboard and I'm pleasantly surprised that Keychron builds something of this quality for such an agreeable price. The one thing I will say is that the backlight is completely pointless without shine-through keycaps. In fact, if the backlight is on, it's even harder to see the keys. So I just leave it off.

The keyboard is awesome, I've been using split keyboards for about 10 years now, and I'm loving my Q10 - the only thing I'm missing is being able to switch the keycaps to use dvorak distribution. I did switched the keycaps but since they are from different heights they feel and look weird. I just wish there was a dvorak layout option for this keyboard, or at least keycaps for Q10 in dvorak. other than that, I would 100% recommend this keyboard.

I have searched for a mechanical keyboard for a few months. I considered many ergonomic models, but this is by far my favourite.

The build quality is exceptional. It feels very heavy/solid. I also love the volume knob. Wonderful.

The build quality is excellent. I don't mod my keyboards much, but do add o-rings to every board I buy and some extra glue on style keyboard legs that I stick on the front/bottom of the keyboard to add a reverse tilt and some extra thick wrist rests (1 grafiti wrist rest under the custom keychron wooden wrist rest).

To my ear the sound was good but Im definitely not a keyboard thocky-sound aficionado. My main concerns are comfort when typing. The stock keys felt great to my hands, the gasket mount made the key presses nice and soft. But that leads me to my only complaint and its large enough to stop me from using this board very often.

For my hands, the alice layout on this board put my right hand little finger in an awkward position any time I had to hit the enter key. I've used angled keyboards before, even another Alice layout board for a little while and they were all fine ... there's just something to the way I need to tweak my finger to hit the enter key on an this particular board layout that hurts. When I do use the board I force myself to not use my right pinky with obvious results to my typing speed. This is more of a personal issue which seems to revolve around the ulnar nerve on my right hand.

That being said, I would recommend this board to anyone familiar and comfortable with an alice layout who doesn't have my injuries. If you want to use this board on a linux distro, configure it on a windows or mac machine first as getting the software to run with proper permissions was a pain ... its way easier to just plug into another machine and program there and for me the key programming worked when I went back to my linux. If someone reading this does have a nerve injury similar to mine where you get pain in your pinky and numbness on the side of your hand I'd still recommend getting a keychron, maybe just another layout.