> They can be loud, depending on the switches you get.
It’s worth noting that for folks who don’t know proper typing technique (which is probably nearly everybody under the age of 40, as nobody really teaches it any more, at least in the countries where I’ve lived) it almost doesn’t matter what sort of mechanical switch you’re using, in terms of noise.
In my experience, the majority of mechanical keyboard noise for most folks doesn’t actually come from the switches at all; it comes from the keys noisily bottoming out on each keystroke.
My theory is that most folks these days learned to type on membrane keyboards where you have to bottom out the keys (often with quite a lot of force, if the keyboard is old), or else on a laptop’s scissor switches where you can’t avoid bottoming out due to the extremely short throw, and so everyone’s just typing with much more force than necessary and driving the keys all the way down to the backplate on every press because that’s what they had to do with the keyboards they learned on.
Which of course makes typing far less pleasant, and also much noisier! The complaints are totally understandable, from that perspective.
This also links into the “Massive travel time” comment; most folks push the keys much too far down while typing on mechanical keyboards!
Cherry MX Blue switches (as one example) actuate at 2mm, which is almost exactly the same distance as most (non-Apple) laptop scissor switches. The only reason that a mechanical keyboard would have “massive travel time” compared to a laptop keyboard is if you’re needlessly pushing the keys all the way down, when you actually only need a gentle tap on them.