Logitech MX Keys wireless keyboard

Just got a MX Keys wireless illuminated keyboard to replace an old K800 that was starting to flake out.

Pros:

It is quite small, yet has standard spacing on the keys, there just isn't any extra wasted space. The borders around the edges are all very small. I wouldn't call it portable, but it is smaller and lighter than most keyboards I've had in the past.

In the most amazing innovation ever in keyboard design, the caps lock indicator led is on the caps lock key itself rather than being on the other side of the keyboard.

The back light does work well in a darker room, I can see the keys fine (and can't see them at all when the back light shuts off).

Since the USB glitch I had which disabled the keyboard, I decided to pair device #2 with bluetooth on the same computer so I can switch between them if one stops working. This was an insanely non-trivial task. I'm apparently missing some Gnome infrastructure in my FVWM session, so the Gnome bluetooth app doesn't work. I had to resort to the low level command line bluetoothctl program, which is incredibly cryptic. I finally found the outbound and inbound descriptions on the internet, and one of them worked (I don't remember which one :-). Anyway, I can indeed switch between device #1 (the USB dongle) and device #2 (bluetooth on the motherboard) now at the press of a button.

After a week, the power light still is green, so it looks like battery life is pretty good. Hint: If you charge the keyboard using one of those portable usb battery packs, you don't need to string a long charging cable around. Update: After a month, the keys finally stopped lighting up, so I'm finally recharging it, but it worked a really long time on the initial charge.

Cons:

The default setting is for the function keys to have weird special functions (like the f6 and f7 keys for adjusting the back light). Obviously no emacs user was involved in the selection of the default. I had to install the Logitech Options software in my windows virtual machine and use usb pass through to give the VM control of the keyboard long enough to toggle the default in the options software. To add insult to injury, the options software informed me I can toggle the default using the fn-esc key combo, something they could have mentioned somewhere before I had to go to the trouble of downloading the software. [UPDATE: They actually do mention this online, but not any place any of my searches turned up, I stumbled across it later.]

I rebooted the system to make absolutely sure I could use the keyboard in the bios, and a weird side effect of the reboot was turning the back light off, making it quite difficult to find the del key to try to get into the bios when doing this in a dark environment (or the f7 key to turn the brightness back up). [UPDATE: Apparently only the default back light setting is persistent across reboot or sleep, etc. If you turn the keyboard off, then on again, you get the default setting, and that one stays on across reboots, so basically you never want to manually fiddle with the brightness.]

The back light bleeds out from under the edge of the keys a lot more than it shines through the key caps. You notice it a lot when using the keyboard in a normal position. It isn't as obvious if you lean over and look directly down on the keyboard, but that isn't a very natural position.

I've been typing on it a while now writing up this web page, and I can't say I like the key feel all that much (but that isn't a problem just for this model keyboard, I mostly don't like any keyboards made these days, and this isn't the worst one I've tried).

Had it about a week and mid-sentence, it suddenly decided to stop talking to the usb dongle. Had to unplug the dongle and plug it back in. I've now paired it with the motherboard bluetooth as the second device, so if it happens again, maybe I'll be able to switch devices (this is just as likely to be a linux kernel bug as a keyboard hardware problem, so I can't say who to blame).

Another weird bluetooth glitch: I had tried pairing it with my phone, just for testing, and when I had my phone near the keyboard, it suddenly stopped talking to the computer and started talking to the phone instead. I don't think I accidentally pressed the button to switch devices, but maybe I did, so I'm not sure I can blame the keyboard.