I still love the particular way that Garuda configures some things from the get go. I always knew it was Arch based and might break eventually. What I didn't expect was the stupid power button deciding that it doesn't want to work anymore.
I did, by pushing really hard in random directions =/ I'm going to have to take it apart and clean things with a hope that it gets fixed. Until then, I'm going to have to only use sleep and not turn it off for real.
That's how I used to turn my tower on when I was a teenager. The motherboard was also outside of the tower, lying on a piece of bubble wrap on the floor. When playing an exciting game, we'd sometimes kick the graphics card out of place.
Honestly, momentary switches are the simplest of all circuits. The only hard part will be soldering a new one into the old leads. What laptop is it? I can look and see what I think.
I did a quick look and it doesn't look like the switch is directly on the motherboard so most likely there's a JST plug or something similar with wire leads that then hook into the switch and/or a daughter board. If it's just two wires into a JST plug you can replace the switch with anything similar or if you wanna be ghetto about it just touch the two wires together to make a short.
You can probably get the exact switch if you look hard enough since almost everything but the exterior shell will be commodity components.
I ordered a keyboard replacement. This thing is a serious pain. The power switch is directly part of the keyboard. Under that button is nothing but silver paint for the contacts, which had firmed a crack over time.
The worst part? Above the keyboard is a thin piece of sheet metal. It is "riveted" on by melting a fee dozen plastic standoff that affixed the metal piece by melting the tips of them. I spent an hour carefully popping them off with a screwdriver. The replacement keyboard fits (good news!), but I have to carefully use a soldering iron to melt the tops of these pieces back into "rivets."
On the plus side, I have upgraded the RAM and added a hard drive. If it POSTs at the end of this, I will have 16gb of RAM and a 4 to add, which will let me ditch the external drive.
Yikes! That's just about the worst case scenario. It's maddening the shortcuts companies play to save literally pennies. Sounds like you've at least solved the problem so hopefully the replacement and all that work is fruitful!
I can't do the lid shutdown thing because the built-in screen also has serious issues. It is very finicky. I just use either the terminal or KDE's built-in feature to do it. I've really put this poor machine through hell.
I just have a script that repeats the "install-kernel" command and the "bootctl install" one that I run after every big update. It should be fine without them, right? Too many times the kernel one fails in the pacman update chain and I've had to chroot from a live USB too many times to do the bootctl install to put the correct bootloaders in the efi partition to skip the manual bootclt install from my actual PC after updates.
Just in case. It takes 2 seconds vs searching the pendrive, loading, typing in an European keyboard when the live USB asumes it's american, searching the chroot command on my phone... All of this when I just want to relax. Weird stuff I know.
Me updating my Arch install in the morning at school (there's faster connection):
But, with current install I finally started writing logs of all manual changes I make (config updates, created symlinks outside home dir, package installations, etc...). I'll finally know what I did instead of trying to guess what weird thing I did 2 years ago.
This is a fantastic idea. Keep a config diary. I can imagine a teenager doing this and eventually getting in trouble with the law. Parents open the diary only to discover scribbled bash scripts in confusion.
For real, though, I'm going to journal it all and upload to NextCloud.
Let us pray that he will be succeeded by a worthy descendant. At least we can always find refuge in BSD - it has not yet started to ensh*tify as I've heard