I'm a pretty hardcore computer guy. There are many guys like me so I do not claim to be the hardcore-est, but, come on now I've been around the block a few times.
I have a pretty particular love-hate relationship with Linux, that is to say, I love everything about linux, but always end up experiencing deep hatred for using the Linux desktop.
Today I will chronicle the latest of the major cock-ups that I incessantly run into during daily use of a Linux desktop environment. This one was something that started cropping up recently. Now note that what I have done recently was upgrade my computer's motherboard, RAM and CPU, and I was able to restore the dual boot situation. So there could possibly be some stale driver interaction state going on here, that's the disclaimer.
Anyway, so what i was seeing was when I am typing and the keys repeat, there would inexplicably be a whole bunch of extra of the key i was repeating that get injected. You can imagine how this completely breaks my ability to use vim where i'm mashing keys to navigate the buffer. Most of the time key repeat is a nice-to-have (e.g. holding it to backspace thru a bunch of stuff), but holding down H, J, K, and L for vim is one situation where key repeat is a core function.
So I had codex help me find the cause and we found it alright:
• ### Postmortem: Runaway key repeat on openSUSE Tumbleweed
My Plasma Wayland session intermittently repeated keys 20–40 times, making normal typing and Vim nearly unusable. The issue affected Qt, GTK, and Chromium applications, but not Linux virtual consoles.
The cause was IBus, configured as KWin’s Wayland input-method provider. It was repeatedly failing to create input contexts and crashing, corrupting session- wide key-repeat behavior.
Disabling IBus under System Settings → Keyboard → Virtual Keyboard fixed the issue immediately—no logout required.
This was exceptionally difficult to diagnose because it resembled faulty hardware, keyboard firmware, USB problems, or a kernel regression. It is a good example of a tiny, obscure desktop-integration failure that could easily drive someone to reinstall an entire operating system.
A more diligent and spidey-sensed Linux user would have gone to review the system logs and the correlation between crashes there and the bad key entry behavior would have been easy to spot. But the fact of the matter is that when I want to use my computer day to day, I don't want to have to read tea leaves in logs. Like I can, I know how to, sometimes I might even be in the mood to. But not all the time.
I was, by the way, planning to install a new OS fresh to avoid this issue. Thanks to AI now I don't need to. Yet.