It turned out 1 of the problems with the mechanical keyboard was a pin falling off the copper leads.  If they're not together, the copper leads collapse on top of the pin & make intermittent contact.  There's no friction holding those 2 together so you have to make sure the sleeve is on before inserting the switch.

The mechanical keyboard is much better with those parts working & at least as good as the repurposed laptop keyboard.  The laptop keyboard would still come up if there was a portable & the code base did identify a lot of trouble spots the engagement driven internet won't support.

It seems Linus Torvalds made a similar foray into a minimal keyboard when the lion kingdom did & then switched back at the same time.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/13/linux_6_15_rc6_keyboards/