river_chunk
Yes, and Google captchas are the worsts of all of them.
I found Buster a while ago and works most of the times, it use the accesibility audio challenger to try to solve it using speech recognition. When it don’t work I found more easy to try the audio challenger, you just need to write the part that you understand and not all you hear, less picky than the images, still a pain in the ass
What about dmesg? if it’s a hardware problem (and it looks like, but I may wrong) dmesg will print some usefull data
sudo dmesg -Tw
-T form human redeable timestamp and -w to follow (like tail -f)
Also, about that hard reset that you did, Linux magic keys are your friends if your are not facing a kernel panic, I have this key combo engraved in my head like a rune:
Press and hold Alt + PrtSc (not Alt+Gr) and then press only one time each (and while holding Alt + PrtSc) E + I + S + U + B
PrtSc maybe be SysRq in your keyboard depends on the manufacturer, architecture or how old it is. Also wait one or two seconds between keys when pressing EISUB.
Edit: the rune in my head was wrong, fixed it