Keychron makes keyboards in a variety of sizes, and most you can configure with different types of switches. They’re priced well, too. I’d start there.

If C is so great, why do you have to hack in garbage collection?

This just blew my mind. I had always assumed Java was older. I started writing hobby projects in Java in the 90s. I don’t think I heard about Python until the early 2000s.

“why” is a perfectly valid question to ask

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

… it would sync overwriting the currently deployed version in qa. I obviously don’t want this.

Then don’t allow the deployed software to be overwritten while tests are running? Your test environment should be treated as a singleton. Your CI system shouldn’t be able to affect the deployment while it’s being used.