JackE said:

Haven't heard of this model having unusually high instances of the problems you describe. Probably been a few lemons that slipped by though. Maybe you lucked out and got one of them. If it was mine and seemed to be generally as unhappy with the laptop as you are, I probably wouldn't bother as long as it's still usable even though a new keyboard and touchpad wouldn't cost that much. It's more the time and effort involved in replacing them.

I haven't heard of it either, but I'm not the best at researching this kind of stuff and I was concerned that both the keyboard and trackpad wore out at similar times.

It looks to me like the keyboard replacement is more difficult and more expensive, and I recently got a mechanical keyboard to use at home. I still need the built-in keyboard to be functional because I can't use the mechanical keyboard everywhere. (I can't keep it on top of the laptop unless it's on a flat surface which is not available everywhere, and it's too loud for use in public, especially in lectures.) So I guess I'll put up with the built in keyboard as it is, and only replace it if it gets worse.

The trackpad looks to be easier and cheaper to replace than the keyboard, and it's more important to me to have that work correctly because I really hate mice so they aren't an option. (I know that's an unpopular opinion, especially among people who use mechanical keyboards, but that's how I feel.) So because you said my trackpad failure is not a common problem and I likely just have a defective unit, I'm going to replace it unless I hear some second opinions telling me otherwise.

That is a different problem. Moving the cursor works perfectly fine. Tap to click works as it is supposed to (but I don't like it so I still want the clicking to work.) The problem is that the button underneath the trackpad requires too much pressure to activate. The trackpad still goes down and emits a click sound at the normal pressure, but I have to press significantly harder for the click to actually register. However, due to the fact that the click is implemented with a button and not a force sensor, this almost certainly cannot be fixed in software.

I'm running Linux on this laptop, so drivers randomly breaking themselves isn't really a thing except for nvidia drivers. On both another kernel and a live USB, the problem still exists (Based on your "All my so-called Win devices default to LinMint for over 2 years now" comment in that thread, I don't think I need to explain what this means.) I think that pretty much eliminates potential driver issues. Theoretically I could reinstall Windows just to try the Windows driver to see if that fixes it, but that sounds like a major hassle.

It is indeed not dual boot. And it's a filesystem on LVM on LUKS on a partition, so that's a lot of layers to shrink.