Hi all! The short version: I've been trying to breathe new life into my old HP Envy 15 laptop and its old Windows OS was running extremely slow, so I decided to start tinkering with various Linux distros to try and make it into a mobile workstation. I am not interested in running games on it or doing anything fancy, it just needs to be able to connect to the internet and run my notetaking app of choice (Joplin, if it matters).
I recently got around to trying Zorin and loved it, but there's one problem: the keyboard inputs are borked. Every so often I will be typing and the keystroke will either be ignored entirely, lag for a few seconds before spitting out a few letters, or repeat endlessly until I press another key. This happens regardless of the app I'm using - it's most obvious in documents, but I will occasionally find that my browser is trying to repeatedly load a page as if I were holding down enter.
Here is what I've tried so far:
- Updating Zorin completely (version is 16.1 with all available updates installed)
- Swapping the USB ports (the keyboard that I use is plugged into a hub, it's currently plugged directly into the PC)
- Slow/sticky keys are disabled
- Using an older kernel (5.13.0--52-generic) as mentioned in another topic on this forum but that didn't affect anything
- Tried checking the syslog around when an episode starts, I haven't done this long enough to notice a real pattern yet but did notice that at least a couple of times that happened there was this message:
Activating service name='org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1' requested by ':1.22' (uid=1000 pid=1270 comm="Thunar --daemon " label="unconfined")
I have no idea what this means, it's basically arcane sorcery to me.
- Monitoring the CPU and RAM usage indicates that they're both operating below maximum capacity
Some other bits:
- This didn't happen when I tried out Zorin on a Live USB. I tried it for a couple of days and it never stuttered once.
- This has happened on every Linux distro I've installed onto the HDD, and on two different PCs (the other is a Dell laptop). Again, this doesn't happen on any Live USB version of any distro.
- I have NOT updated the BIOS. I understand that this can sometimes fix this issue, but Zorin is the only OS on this PC (so, not dual boot Windows to update it easily), plus as mentioned it happens on a different model laptop anyway.
Any ideas about what's going on and what I could do would be great - I would hate to have to write off this laptop entirely or, worse, have to try going back to Windows. Thank you.