I haven't been using my primary laptop for maybe six months because the keyboard was broken. Yesterday, while waiting for w traffic light to change, I saw a little PC repair shop. I phoned them this morning to get a price check on taking the laptop apart enough to resit the plug at the end of the keyboard connector cable (£10-15, apparently). So I booted up the laptop to confirm the problem is still happening, and it's not?

Does this mean it's fixed? I don't think so, but I'd be very happy to be wrong so I'm going to fettle it up like it's working and use it as my primary until it starts being broken again.

This does leave me with the traditional "Windows or Linux" question, although given a hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics card, and how well WSL2 works, the Windows option is fairly strong.

Old laptop is still working, so far so good.

I've wiped it and installed Windows 11. First impressions are that it's going to be fine, it's fairly close to Windows 10 and the differences are minor. Windows 11 feels rounder (like, all the corners have got a border radius of something), and my first impressions are probably trained by the stupid keyboard on that laptop (I paid extra for a "mechanical" keyboard, boy was I dumb).

The key spacing is different/wrong, and I'm constantly typing one character to the right of where I should be Also the Windows key doesn't work (nothing happens when I press it, haven't investigated any deeper yet), which is bloody irritating given how much I use Windows snap.

I'll clone down a couple of repos tomorrow and see how I get on.