I've been looking for a significantly quiet keyboard that is capable of handling gaming for a while now. I'd personally prefer to use something with brown Cherry switches, but I never bought myself one because the noise annoyed everyone at home when I borrowed a Zowie Celeritas for a month. And I don't really mind regular rubber dome keys tbh.

I am on my PC quite late at night and often into the morning, and everyone in my family are light sleepers so the keyboard annoys them very often especially coupled with the fact that I may type quite fast making even more noise.

I am currently using a friend's old Microsoft Reclusa and I actually like it for typing etc and it's quieter than most similar keyboards I've used in the past, but I have other gripes with it.

I have no special requirements, just certain things I require to be comfortable:

# no laptop style thin/flat keys, so no scissor switches either
# preferably USB, though PS/2 wont hurt
# with/without wrist-rest doesn't matter, but if present it should be removable
# backlight, onboard ports etc aren't required, although backlight in such conditions is nice to use
# don't need any weird ergonomics/curves etc. i like the good old straight squared layout.
# nothing unnecessarily big. i don't like the so called compact ones where the keys layout is different from the regular one, but i'm fine with tenkeyless type keyboards since they're basically regular keyboards with the numpad chopped off.
# which leads me to another point: i don't want extra keys or controls if they make the keyboard bigger. if you look at some of my keyboards like the MS Digital Media and Reclusa, the extra stuff on the left/right side add more to the size of the keyboard and i really don't have much space to deal with that. this also affects my mouse movement since i sometimes hit the keyboard :[

I've been told that laptop style keyboards will be more like what I'm looking for but I'm not very keen on getting used to those, although if they're the solution I guess I will go ahead with one. I just want something that won't have key rollover issues and will last me a while.