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# My Print Screen Key Stopped Working....

**URL:** https://crunchtools.com/my-print-screen-key-stopped-working/
Date: 2026-03-11
Author: fatherlinux
Post Type: post
Summary: My print screen key on my external keyboard stopped working. Not the one built into the laptop, that was working fine. The one on my external keyboard. It had worked fine, and then it randomly stopped working! Why? I have no idea. This kind of thing isn&amp;#8217;t supposed to happen in computers, but we all&amp;lt;p class=&amp;quot;excert-link-wrapper&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;https://crunchtools.com/my-print-screen-key-stopped-working/&amp;quot; class=&amp;quot;excerpt-more-link&amp;quot; &amp;gt;Continue Reading&amp;lt;span class=&amp;quot;screen-reader-text&amp;quot;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;My Print Screen Key Stopped Working&amp;#8230;.&amp;quot;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&amp;lt;span class=&amp;quot;meta-nav&amp;quot;&amp;gt; &amp;rarr;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;
Categories: Articles
Tags: AI/ML, Generative AI, Linux, Systems Administration
Featured Image: https://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/print-screen-key-stopped-working-thumbnail.png
---

My print screen key on my external keyboard stopped working. Not the one built into the laptop, that was working fine. The one on my external keyboard. It had worked fine, and then it randomly stopped working! Why? I have no idea. This kind of thing isn&#039;t supposed to happen in computers, but we all know there are gremlins in them.

If you&#039;re a long-time computer user, you know this scenario can end in three major ways:

- **It randomly fixes itself one day**: this could be during a software update, a reboot, or just completely random

- **It Stays Broken Forever**: it could just &quot;never work again&quot; – like, oh well, it&#039;s gone. Digital Nihilism, I&#039;ll open the laptop screen to access the keyboard, first world problems. Annoying, but whatever.

- **You Get Super-fire Mad**: it randomly makes you so mad that you decide to shave your head, dedicate yourself to the god of war, and go on the attack. You might spend 1.5 hours, days, or even weeks until you figure it out. Hardcore Zen?

![](https://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/20260126_101851-300x225.jpg)Broken print screen key on external keyboard

But, now, there&#039;s a fourth option, and I used it the other day, and I was blown away. I used Claude Code. I had a minor version of #3 happen. For a split second, I saw hot flashes, and flickers of all of the Samurai movies I&#039;ve ever watched. The God of war was whispering to me… But then I realized. I don&#039;t need to go to war. I don&#039;t need to fight with the gremlins. I already have a tool that never gets tired, and has zero emotion about fighting with gremlins.

So…. I turned Claude Code loose on it. I basically held down the 2 key, and let it do whatever it wants. 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2…. I&#039;d get distracted with email, or work, and kept coming back to the terminal. It would ask another question: lsusb? Yes. Gconf, dsettings, yes, yes. Something, something Flatpak? Yes. I lost track of what it was doing. I run Gradia in a Flatpak to capture my screen, and I just want my print key to start working again!!!!

And it did. I was in shock. It works again, no more god of war, no more shaving my head, no more shaving the yaks…..

I want to be clear about something though. I didn&#039;t learn much about why my print screen key stopped working. I have no idea what Claude Code actually did to fix it. It ran a bunch of commands, poked around in dconf settings, did something with Flatpak permissions, and at the end of it all, the key works again.

And I think that&#039;s actually the interesting part. For my entire career, there&#039;s been this assumption that when you fix something, you should understand why it broke. That&#039;s how you get better. And I still believe that, in general. But there&#039;s a whole class of problems, the gremlins, where the juice isn&#039;t worth the squeeze. Nobody was going to write a post-mortem about my print screen key.

Claude Code gave me a fourth outcome: it&#039;s fixed, I lost about ten minutes, and I moved on with my day. And then it broke again a few weeks later, and Claude Code fixed it again. It also helped me track down why my laptop was randomly overheating and rebooting. Turned out I needed firmware updates, and it walked me through the whole fwupd process. For the gremlins, for the little things that make you want to shave your head and go to war, maybe it&#039;s okay to let something else fight that battle for you.

My print screen key works. I&#039;m keeping my hair. Life goes on.

---

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