Kinesis Advantage 360

I've using a Kinesis Advantage for 10 years now. I got my Kinesis after switching to Dvorak, which maybe (maybe) improved my typing speed, but more importantly — I had to re-learn how to type, and get rid of all the quirks that come with learning how to type by yourself very early in one's life.

That is to say, it made the transition to Kinesis Advantage a breeze.

I cannot speak for how its ergonomic might or might not translate into helping with RSI, but having constant back/neck/other joints pains since I was 15, one change that I introduced to my (variable height) desk last year was, at least for me, more dramatic than any other: I installed a keyboard drawer, which enable me to align my Mirra's arm rest with the keyboard (my desk and most other variable height desks do not go low enough to allow that).

The Advantage 360 could improve my setup as and I might get it just to be able to rest my arms at my shoulders natural width, which for me should be slightly wider than the regular Advantage.

And in case anyone's wondering what I'm talking about, back when I was about to buy my Kinesis, just about every user report I could find online mentioned that sometimes the modifiers get stuck. I really hoped that was just a coincidence, but no, my new keyboard did the same thing, and when I asked other users I came across along the way, they all said it's a regular thing with the Kinesis Advantage.

Some tried to get Kinesis to repair it but response ranged from not acknowledging the issue at all and playing oblivious, or blaming the computer, sometimes offering to replace a circuit board in the keyboard (this does not fix the problem).

There's also this 2016 web.archive.org snapshot where Kinesis is blaming the computer for missing the upstroke (what a joke to anyone who has the slightest clue of how USB or the input stack in your favorite kernel works): https://web.archive.org/web/20160221095425/http://www.kinesi...

The reality is that it's all in their firmware and looks like it took them nearly two decades to fix (if not more, I'm not sure exactly how far back the issue goes.. I think some people claim it was also happening with the old PS/2 model!) with the release of Advantage 2.

More anecdotes here, it was discussed when the Advantage 2 released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237836

Nice keyboard but it really left me with a "shitty company" taste. And yeah, shitty proprietary firmware.

Surely you don't expect people using keyboards without dedicated function keys (or number rows) are aiming to never need to use those keys?

The trade-off from fewer keys is reduced hand movement (& a smaller keyboard, cheaper to buy switches for, etc.), at the cost of additional complexity of use, & it not really being easy for anyone else to use your keyboard.

It seems reasonable either way to prefer one or the other. -- I suspect that most of the people enthusiastic about the smaller keyboard layouts are also into keyboard-driven workflows, and are developers who also frequently need to use the symbols accessed using layers.

if the layer button is easily accessible, it isn't so bad imo. I have a function layer available just by moving my thumbs one button "inward" from resting position and I love it. It seems I like layers more than a lot of people though so *shrug.

> Surely you don't expect people using keyboards without dedicated function keys (or number rows) are aiming to never need to use those keys?

I could imagine that some people never use the function keys. Or never use the numpad keys. To some people they might be completely useless... Which would make a smaller keyboard understandable.

Now, people who do need all those keys and yet still go for a smaller keyboard is harder for me to understand. :)

> The trade-off from fewer keys is reduced hand movement (& a smaller keyboard, cheaper to buy switches for, etc.), at the cost of additional complexity of use, & it not really being easy for anyone else to use your keyboard.

The trade-offs seem a bit one-sided. Hand movements are not a big deal unless you are going constantly back and forth between the main part and the nav cluster or the numpad. And all of these custom keyboards with their 60%, 67.5%, etc. sizes are already so… boutique and expensive that I don’t think that people are forfeiting a dozen or so keys in order to save some money.