Not entirely dissatisfied, but disappointed.
Functional keys, cursor, home/end/pgup/pgdn are painful. The default layout is complete garbage. I made 3 iterations with functional keys over 4 months, still struggling. I connect the kbd to the laptop via the monitor, and recently noticed myself switching to the laptop to get things done quicker.
This fad completely mystifies me. Why would anyone want fewer keys and less keyboard on the desk?
I'd understand immediately if these were intended to be portable units, but I've never seen any of them billed that way.
What I, and presumably also the previous poster, don't understand is using the 60% keyboards that remove so many more keys than just the numpad.
I mean, if you're happy with it then great; it's your keyboard. But I just don't understand it.
Many keys means you'll have to move the hands to reach the outermost (or at least rotate the hand around it's "heel" bone). It limits speed and adds to fatigue. When there are less keys, your hand does not need to move/turn to reach, but you'll need 1-2 extra layers and modifier keys (most users put them on thumbs pad). This will take some time to learn, and it's not clear how to organize them.
So this is a fundamental problem: many easy to use keys vs fewer keys, less reach distance but harder to learn.
I've recently emailed the ZSA team about my struggles with text editing, and they suggested me examples how to overcome this with an extra layer specifically for this. [2]
This is too big of a jump to make in one go, and the sudden overhead in the amount of new information your mind and fingers need to get adjusted to ends up overwhelming a lot of people.
When you switch to a custom keyboard like the one you did. It's not just a split keyboard you're switching to, you also move to a smaller form factor that has lesser keys, and an ortholinear layout which has column stagger instead of row stagger. It's most effective to transition by gradually moving to the next form factor only after you're fully comfortable with the previous ones.
In your case, something like the Kinesis freestyle would have been a much better choice for you.
I bought a fancy, customizeable, ergonomic, mechanical keyboard. It feels great! But it's too much hazzle to learn, customize, OS changes etc.
I bought it because I was having wrist pain, and my old keyboard was one I got for free from the college surplus back in 2011. So I thought it was a sensible purchase.
I'm back to cheapo surplus keyboard.
Either they are all 15 year olds with infinite time and better neuroplasticity or... more likely, people that quit are a bit embarassed about it.
If you are thinking of moving to another keyboard with fewer keys, you may want to to do something to keep track of if or how often you are using those keys that you'll be missing. Force yourself to use key combinations on your current keyboard instead of those keys specifically on your current keyboard and find out if it is doable before making the purchase.
It's a ~60% keyboard, which means it's missing a lot of keys. Notably the F keys and the navigation keys (pgup, pgdn, ins, del, etc). There are ways to remap the blank keys to what you really need, and of course there are all the key sequences and chords you can use. But you have to memorize this stuff, because many of the keys are unlabeled by necessity.
I use it on my PC, Mac (work), and Linux (steamdeck). It's a lot of cognitive burden remembering shortcuts and which modifier keys do what on which OS, with the added headache of having to remember which unlabeled or remapped keys are which modifier keys. I love the feel of it and for normal typing it's great, but anytime I stray from the basic keys (A-Z, numbers, etc) it becomes difficult. I end up doing embarrassing things like using right click on my mouse to do things like copy/paste.
If I was on exactly one OS all day long, I think I could make it work. But juggling 3 is annoying.
If I could redo it all over again I'd realize I didn't need a split ergo keyboard, and would have gotten something more traditional.