Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

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A laptop by default is not suitable for working any substantial length of time due to the fixed coupling between its screen and keyboard. Separating them—so that you can relax while keeping your screen roughly at your eye level and at comfortable distance, and your elbows bent at comfortable 90 degrees (or more)—gets you 80% there in terms of ergonomics.

You could carry around a portable display, but that might be a bit of an overkill in terms of cost and bulk. Unlike a display, a portable keyboard is lighter and often smaller than the laptop itself. Modern wireless keyboards have almost no lag, have nice mechanical keys with replaceable keycaps, etc.

Working away from a stationary setup, I consider a separate keyboard a must—and particularly a wireless keyboard, since the one thing that reliably breaks on every laptop is physical I/O, especially USB/USB-C ports (and every time plugging/unplugging another accessory brings that closer).

Working with a stationary setup you have a detached keyboard anyway, and if it’s wired you don’t really need to unplug it, like, ever, so a wireless keyboard loses a lot of its advantages—though if you have a really large screen and have a lot of leeway for moving your chair around for comfortable work not having cables get in the way might be nice as well.

I find the notion that wires are less reliable than wireless extremely contrary to my own experience.

I would not argue that wired is more reliable in terms of connection. It’s just that if you’re working at a laptop then connection reliability competes with wear and tear, ergonomics, and outlier scenarios like “trip on a cable and brick your work machine” (e.g., by spilling coffee or dropping it). In case of a desktop, connection reliability only competes with ergonomics, and to a much lesser extent—I can see myself using a wired keyboard at a desktop, perhaps even a split one (and that’s an additional wire).

Anecdotally, I don’t tend to run into connection issues with wireless keyboards—I do with wireless mice, however.

Hm, yeah, laptops are a bit difficult ergonomically. For me, just the hassle of "this is misbehaving again, is it the battery or interference?" is enough to prefer wired everything, but I get your point about wear and tear.

Luckily, in USB-C, the springy bit is in the cable, so that's where the wear and tear is. If it stops working, the cable is generally easy to replace.

I’ve had many similar issues with ports, to be honest. Just recently had to get the I/O board swapped on an M1 MBP—one day it decided that one of the USB ports wouldn’t connect 80% of the time. It was relatively inexpensive to do officially even without the warranty (around US$60 all in all), and took just a couple of days, to be fair.

Huh, maybe I'm an outlier. Maybe it's the way you remove your connectors? Some people tend to wiggle them side-to-side, I touch the chassis with my thumb and index finger around the USB, and kind of roll my fingers so they put pressure against the chassis. That leads to the removing force vector pointing strictly straight out of the connector, and I've never had a problem with any port.

Past me was definitely careless. Current me—doubtful, or at least I’d like to think I’d have learned to be nicer to ports…

> I touch the chassis with my thumb and index finger around the USB, and kind of roll my fingers so they put pressure against the chassis

This doesn’t work when you have two ports in close proximity and one of them is occupied. In that scenario I’d have to either lift the laptop in order to squeeze the connector from top & bottom while removing (this option requires not being exhausted or lazy) or pull on a cable a bit further away from the connector (though I do it gently nowadays, pushing with another finger against the chassis for at least some balance).

That’s not what the parent said. The wired connection itself is better, but it has the tradeoff of physical wear and tear and ports that break.

Right, but I count both as reliability, and while I've had wireless connections be flaky tons of times, I haven't had a physical port break yet.

Either you mean a desktop machine, or I envy you. Every one of my laptops had developed issues with physical I/O (be it ports, keyboard, trackpad). The one I especially hate is flaky USB ports that make external HDD spontaneously disconnect while being heavily used, like copying many files over (and it’s not a power issue as it happened both while laptop is powered and with HDDs that have their own dedicated power).

Ah, I use a Framework, so if (when?) a physical port goes bad, I can just replace it for $10 or whatnot. I've never had issues like you mention, though.

The most flaky removable thing I've encountered is microSD cards, and I don't know if it's the card or the reader, but they tend to only work half the time. I even check them for authenticity of space, so I don't know why they're so flaky.

My previous laptop had indeed its SD slot borked at some point (part of why I don’t care that my new laptop lacks it—I would just not expect it to work reliably, so why have another dust collection point). My first laptop’s keyboard had very occasionally working keys in the middle (I blame my pianist fingers bashing them too hard)—I count that as physical I/O, though not a port issue.

Is it easy to source replacement I/O boards for Framework?

Yes, but wireless wouldn't have saved you with the latter.

Sure, as long as the keyboard is separate (wired or not) bashing it would have saved the built-in keyboard for a rainy day.

You may want to get one with replaceable switches, I built one and had one or two switches go bad after a few years, I popped them off, plugged new ones in, and that was it. Lifesaver.

Much respect for people building keyboards (a colleague’s done it as well). Since I’d love to have a compact split one (whether wired or not), and apparently it’s quite hard to find them pre-built and in stock, it looks like I’d have to get into building them as well. It’d be a while though, gotta move to a bigger place to have the space to build anything at all.

But on the original topic, it appears that modern wireless keyboards fare well enough as far as connection and latency[0] to qualify for gaming, so I wonder if your impression about connection reliability could be a bit outdated?

[0] https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/reviews/logitech/g715#test_6...

A friend builds wireless keyboards, so I guess they must be fine now with ZMK, but the issue I had with mine and QMK was that I never knew if the battery was dying or if the keyboard was just being flaky. I switched to wired and never looked back, but, to be fair, it is for a desktop computer.

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