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Comment by jtc331 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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