Not All Linears Are The Same!
Figure 1: Not even all of these (mostly) KTT-made linears are the same! After all of my years of collecting, reviewing, and obsessing over switches, I can say with certainty that linear switches are the most misunderstood of all of the switch types. No, I’m not talking about mechanically either, as all of the claims of them “just going straight up and down” are somewhat kind of true. (Not too much though, don’t get that excited.) The part that is often misunderstood, though, is usually in what is being implied when people say that these switches just go straight up and down – “All linears might as well be the same.” If the title of this article didn’t make that obvious enough to you, I find that sort of idea to be completely and utterly wrong. The people who make these implications wouldn’t say that a Cherry MX Black is the same as a Novelkeys Cream switch? They also certainly wouldn’t ever claim that every Gateron-made linear is the same as every fancy TTC one out there...
May 29, 2024
Dang, that sure feels like a lot to go through. For marketing of switches which may only be a few sentences on a screen next to the big, glowing ‘Add to Cart’ button, who could have thought there were so many useful and useless details in those sentences? While finding the right switch from a sales listing, alone, is more of an art than a science, know that it will come with practice and with the more experience you pick up with switches. I’d be lying if I said it was an art that I, myself, have mastered even. Whenever you are in doubt about any marketing phrase when it comes to switches, the first thing to do is to always reach out to people in the community to ask or to look up some more information on your own. Chances are that if you have a question about it, some of the other hundreds of thousands of people with mechanical keyboards will also have had them as well!