If this garbage is on my keyboard I will drill that motherfucker out no second thought
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I have a Lenovo usb keyboard with a fn Key in place of the Ctrl key that has absolutely no purpose. It's for volume control like fn+F7 BUT... IT ALSO HAS DEDICATED BUTTONS FOR VOLUME CONTROL!!
After the nth time I accidentally switched fn and Ctrl I took a screwdriver and popped it out permanently (being USB it doesn't report fn status to the os and of course the BIOS doesn't allow FN remapping because it's not a laptop)
I was able to remap it with Autohotkey on Windows.
Yeah, I used PowerToys and it's now Right Control again. It was probably easier than finding drivers for Linux.
Just don't buy an AI slop PC and get a Thinkpad, or a Framework laptop instead. Vote with your wallet. If you already own an AI PC, well, OP's post might help.
Pretty sure MS made this a "standard keyboard" button, which could mean it needs to be included for the OEM to be able to put windows on the machine.
You can remap that key on a hardware level with a little flathead screwdriver. 🪛 🗑️
why even buy that slop of hardware beforehand? if you dont want that feature, you might be happier with another brands laptop
so fucking stupid
But if you slap Linux on it, it just does nothing then or is it mapped as old AltGr or whatever?
Neither, it will be as if you pressed all those keys in the list above, which will most of the time do nothing
Is it? I mean, if I have Linux installed, you know.
Yeah... All the tools in Linux are going to do this weird thing where they expect it to behave like a normal key. So you'd have to do all the hacks mentioned to make it work. For example, GNOME keybind stops detecting the key bind when you release. Etc. Maybe the kernel will accept a “broken copilot key hack“ that implements it but it's not good.
Even with hacks, it still won't work like a modifier like most people use alt/ctrl/win because those rely on knowing the key up to see multiple keys pressed together before release. So... Broken.
Note to self: start looking into building my own keyboards if it ever becomes standard, somehow.
Another great product of Free Market Capitalism ©
Never thought I'd say this... I'm considering a Mac as my next laptop.
Base model Macbook Airs are very hard to beat for price:performance, especially now the new base model has 16gb of RAM. I've been to numerous local computer shops and felt and tried numerous Windows laptops that were around the same price and they all felt like flimsy plastic trash.
The Mac Mini is also very good for its price and size. My dad is considering a base model Mini to replace his Windows office computer which is on 10 and reached EOL and he doesn't want 11.
My ThinkPad has one and it is just kinda there... despite it supposedly being remapable since Kernel 6.16 or so I can't get it to properly remap.
I'd love to map it to open LM Studio lol