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)
Are they worth it(Last long)?
It would be unfair for me to answer this.
A keyboard lasts as long as you make it last, in other words, until you spill a beer or coke on it… Even then there may be hope. I have a working IBM Model M from 1989 if that matters…
I have several perfectly working mechanical keyboards from the 80s, so I’d say, yeah they last long. That being said, I don’t necessarily think you’ll get decades from $40 mechanical keyboard like you can from an old school IBM, Alps, or Cherry MX keyboard. I mean, you may, but these keyboards were most than $40 back then and adjusted for inflation they’d not be cheap these days.