Now owning the Gentoo and the Adelie, I feel like this board has been a step down in quality. The Adelie looks and feels like a product of true affection for the form factor. The fitment of the parts and the excellent attention to detail, the curvature matching the flat parts on the front and back. The rock solid feel of the board along with the mild amount of flex as you're typing, and the consistent sound of each keypress top to bottom, left to right. It's not perfect, no board is. The LEDs that indicate layers are just offset to the right angle that they shine directly through the caps and needle you in your peripheral. I turned them off. It was an expensive little board but I'm very happy with it.
I preface my comments about the Gentoo with this: I'm keeping the board. I paid for it and I'm going to enjoy it despite its flaws. I like 65% just as much as the other form factors in my collection and it's a pretty board, but just not as nice as the Adelie. The fitment of the parts is not as well-done as the Adelie. Maybe this was intended to prevent collision of parts? I don't know. But it doesn't have that "like a glove" look to it that other boards have achieved. Use an Iron165 (or others) as an example and you see how tight those tolerances are. With this board, the top and bottom pieces have a gap that almost looks like gasketing was intended to go in between them. As I type, my thumbs dip down and touch the curvature at the front of the board. It's almost a sharp border. It makes me think costs were cut with CNC time by not having as smooth of a curvature to the flat areas. Again with the Adelie it's pretty smooth, but not perfect. Sound consistency? Maybe by row but not by column. More hollow near the number row, more solid by the spacebar. I don't know what the solution is there, I used case foam to dampen the sound. Didn't seem to help that much. Flex? I used a PC plate which was very flexy, of course. Finally assembled there really isn't much flex because the PCB does not flex. It's too thick. Then there's the plate foam. I think it was an afterthought and thrown in the mix simply to make more money. As it was it prevented the stabilizers from returning properly and I had to make significant cuts. If it had been tested prior to starting the GB those problems would have immediately been found. Which sort of brings me back full circle over the entire thing. I don't think this board was as much of a labor of love as much as something that was likely pushed by Cannonkeys, to make money. I do not fault a company for wanting to make money off of products or services, but at the price point this board went for, far more attention to detail should have been done. Testing would have made all of these issues plainly evident. Maybe they were and the company that did the machining did a bad job and Cannonkeys just passed the buck along. Speaking of Cannonkeys, branding is far more evident on the PCB. So there's that? (I don't care about branding really). 65% is hot. I get it. It's hits the sweet spot for most people and the push for a business would be to take concept X and make it 65%.
Lastly, and this is not limited to the Gentoo alone, there's a bit of a disconnect lately between the hobbyist community and making solid build instructions. I don't know what it is but it's pure laziness not to. Even just taking 10 minutes to make bullet point instructions would be better than nothing. I might lay that in Cannonkeys' lap this time since it's "their" board.
Yes this is a hobby and I'm not trying to extract blood from a stone with my review of the board, just express that the board was a bit of a let down compared to the excellent job done during Gen1/Adelie.
I'd have to agree with helborne's comment. Now typing on the Gentoo after the build there's two things that really did irk me the most when you're talking about a $450 board:
1. The front curvature really annoys the overall quality and experience, and should have not been there and really depreciates the build quality. Never tried the Adelie, but I'll assume that this doesn't happen with the other penguin
2. The bottom screws for the back row should have been much longer to accommodate the deeper hole. Looks to be that from CK where screw hole and screw design are shared for CK group buys to ease up the complexity, but it should not have been difficult at all getting two variants. The main reason and criticism on this topic was that due to the screw hole feels as if the radius did not consider for the ecoating, the screws easily strips the screw hole for every screw/unscrew. Not only there's a feel that screw taps feels cheap and hard to screw in, which is almost the killer blow when we talk about quality.
Similarity, I'm obviously still keeping the kit, but it's a step down from what I would think an experienced KB and keyset GB runner should have produced in the end.
