Daddy Tech support and adventures in Linux

[Murph]

I have lost my mind (at least my wife thinks so), I have since 2020 purchased 4 1/2 laptops from System 76 ( the 1/2 is an HP Dev One running POP!_OS).  I have installed Mint Linux on three of them (Lemur Pro, Galago Pro, and HP Dev One), one was a distro testing laptop that ended up with LMDE 5 before I needed to give it to a good buddy who needed a laptop, so it got POP!_OS back on it, and he loves it.  The last one is the Darter Pro, and since Mint 21 would not see the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, it went to Fedora 36 Cinnamon, then back to POP!_OS.  All my systems have at least 16 gb of Ram, and a 500+gb drive.  The two that I love the most are the System 76 Lemur Pro, which you will pull from my cold dead fingers before I give it up, and the HP Dev One which is what I am using to type this.

I want laptops that have lots of ports, and it comes with an Ethernet port, then that is even better.  All of these laptops meet that standard.  I will admit it, I am a port whore.  Plus I want a larger battery, and the 73 watt/hr in the Lemur Pro is great, especially with TLP enabled for longer battery life.

I also put Linux on a Macbook Pro (2015 13" POP!_OS) and a Lenovo T480s (POP!_OS) both of which are now with a friend.  At home I am managing too darn many systems.  Two Intel NUCs which are attached to the televisions since YouTube's ad server kills videos after the first one, so I use an ad blocker and kill ALL the ads.  So no more fussing from the Spouse-Unit.  I also support the Spouse Unit's laptops (her retirement unit, and her old laptop), and until recently my youngest daughters HP laptops until she got a Mac.  Best decision ever.  I never get called for tech support anymore!

Tech support for the Spouse Unit is a daily event as she loses her icons, deletes things she should not delete, forgets to backup and update, etc.  So my oldest daughter and I have a an update day every two weeks.  Fortunately my oldest daughter is pretty computer literate.  I also support the Spouse Unit's iPhone (I HATE IT).  I am going to get her a Macbook Air M2 for Christmas so I can stop doing tech support.  For a retirement gift I got her an HP Ryzen 7 (8/16) with 16 gb of ram, and 500 gb drive.  She likes it well enough.  However she wants to just turn it on and it work, sort of like a toaster....

I have only one personal Winders device and that is my 2016 desktop which I use for those things that Linux cannot do such as iTunes (gotta have it), Photoshop (GIMP is nowhere close), and gaming (gaming on Linux is sheer frustration).  I have pretty much on my laptops that I take on the road with gone 100% Linux Mint.  

I have retired (FINALLY!) after 28 years at the Sheriff's Office, with the last four as the Sergeant in charge of the Internal Affairs/Cold Cases/Sensitive Investigations unit which was extremely stressful.  I dealt with our Texas Ranger on almost a daily basis, Secret Service and Attorney General monthly, and if I could avoid them, I never dealt with the FBI.  

As an old retired guy, I spend my time on the Linux forums, go to coffee shops to drink overpriced swill in the mornings, then go and do what I want to do until I go home.  I eat at a local Indian place at least once a week, since the food is so insanely good at the Tandoor Palace.  Also a little Vietnamese place close to the house.  

Retirement is good, the kids tell me that I am the "daddy they remember", meaning not the extremely stressed, angry, uptight dad of the last six years.  I am loving playing around on computers and learning new things in Linux.  

[sunday]

WELCOME BACK!

I should always appreciate you posting about Ryzen microprocessors back then, currently driving a 5900X.

If you want the previous 3700X, pls PM me.

Edited October 24, 2022 by sunday

[Murph]

Thank you.

[Murph]

If you can afford one, I can highly recommend the HP Dev One ($1099 with AMD Ryzen 5850 8/16, 16 gb of Ram (upgradeable to 64), and 1 TB NVME drive) with POP!_OS, or the System 76 Lemur Pro (insane battery life).  Both have great keyboards with the HP having a slight edge, plenty of ports, 14" 1080p monitors, and they are the best laptops I have ever owned.  Both are covered in stickers (an unquantifiable speed increase....) so I can ID my laptops immediately.  

[sunday]

I am mainly a desktop user now. Better serviceability, and a smartphone covers my needs when in the move.

[Murph]

I have my "road warriors" to go to the coffee shops.  

[sunday]

I like my two 1440p, 27" monitors! 😎

[Murph]

As do I.  I am planning on getting a 3rd for my home desktop.  But its a little too big to drag off to the coffee shop.   

[sunday]

When I work from home, I work from home 😁

[Murph]

I don't work....  I love being retired I can actually tell people "NO" and get away with it.

[Murph]

OMFG! I just spent two hours setting up my wife's Christmas present, a Macbook Air M2.  It took me too darn long to get Microsoft Office installed and functional, and then to set up all the Apple stuff.  Give me a Linux computer any day of the week, I can go from cold boot to fully installed and configured within 45 minutes.  

[sunday]

I see a fruitful, after-retirement career here...

[lucklucky]

Checked that HP DevOne. Not sold outside US it appears and no GPU so will not work for me, but the 1000nit display for outside is a must.

[lucklucky]

On 10/24/2022 at 4:20 PM, Murph said:

For a retirement gift I got her an HP Ryzen 7 (8/16) with 16 gb of ram, and 500 gb drive.  She likes it well enough.  However she wants to just turn it on and it work, sort of like a toaster....

Well if she put it on sleep it will be like that. 

[Murph]

2 hours ago, lucklucky said:

Checked that HP DevOne. Not sold outside US it appears and no GPU so will not work for me, but the 1000nit display for outside is a must.

I so wish it was available, it is an amazing laptop.  It is  based on the elitebook chassis.  

[sunday]

And thus the Broken Computers subforum became alive again.

[Rick]

Murph, welcome back! Have always been impressed with your computer skills and moral defense of civilization. 

I fully admit to being computer illiterate. I hate 'em! We have some god-awful Windows version -- I'm pretty sure it's not the latest version -- at work attached to my fundus (eyeball) camera and my god, it brings out the ex-sailor language in me!!

 

Edited October 26, 2022 by Rick

[Murph]

Thanks Rick.

I have decided I am bored.  So I am going to re-install Fedora Cinnamon on the Darter Pro.  It works really well, and the big difference in terminal commands is the use of "dnf" vs "apt".  I moved back to POP!_OS on that particular laptop since for some reason under Mint 21 it would not see the USB-C/thunderbolt ports.  The ports worked great using Fedora 36 Cinnamon.  I am at the coffee shop and having my normal morning of computing.  Its raining here, YAHOO!!!  We need rain desperately.  I have decided that I am going to make the Darter Pro my distro testing computer.  

It is funny, I love Linux Mint, but any time I install a new distro for someone, I use POP!_OS from System 76, since everyone has decided they like it and can use it.  

I went out and lost my mind, and got the Spouse Unit her Macbook Air M2 and have been setting it up.  Mac OS is strange.  And annoying to me.  But she will love her new computer.

[Murph]

Well, more "Daddy Tech Support" calls.  The Spouse-Unit decided that she was going to some how zorch her NUC which is attached to her television in her sewing room.  She was attempting some how to put the YouTube icon on the task bar, and somehow ended up really messing things up.  So, I spent some time, and got things reset to the way they were, showed her AGAIN, where the icons were in Chrome, told her to only go to Chrome to get to YouTube (her sewing and quilting channels).  Then she told me that he iPhone was acting strange, so I checked it, and she had not updated it in...quite some time.  So I did the update and the problem was cured.  The issue was it kept telling her there was an update.  She told me that was not her job, but mine since I got all these darn electronics.  

She then told me her car was acting strange, so I went out and checked the oil, there was none showing on the dipstick.  I don't ever drive her car, I have showed her how to check, or to ask me to check.  Then she yelled at me for her letting her oil get really low.  I sent her to the oil change shop to get an oil change (she was only 1,000 miles overdue).  She never remembers to do so.  *sigh*  As she tells me Tech support is in the marriage vows.....

The youngest told me that her little HP laptop was "glitching", so I asked if she had installed updates?  Her answer, No, I don't know how to deal with those, so I will let you do it when I come home for Thanksgiving...  It took me three tries to get her to go into settings on her Macbook Air, just to turn off "natural scrolling".  Aaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!  I am sure that she is 3-4 updates behind on the HP.  It used to be my windows emergency laptop, but she decided she did not like her 15.6" Spectre X360 that she JUST HAD TO HAVE, despite me telling her to get the smaller one.  She told me that the big one was too heavy in her backpack..... So she took my little laptop, and left her big one at the house, where I have stuck it in a drawer and bring it out every now and then to update.  

This why I got her and the Spouse-Unit a Mac, so I would not have to deal with Windows Tech Support issues.  

[sunday]

I wonder if that is one way for them to show their love for their spouse/father.

[Murph]

They did they bought me a System 76 Lemur Pro laptop back in 2020.  And you will pry that laptop out of my cold dead fingers.  Plus the spouse unit did not raise a stink when I purchased the HP Dev One as a retirement gift to me.

[Murph]

OMFG! Why does Apple have to be so bass-ackward in what they do in Mac OS!?  You cannot select all in "icon" view, but you can in "list" view in order to transfer files!?  The more I use Mac OS to get the Spouse Unit's laptop set up, the more I am glad I use Linux or Windows!  Apple and Mac OS is perfect for those folks who just want to turn it on, and it work for the very limited things they need to do, and that Apples lets them do.  It is like a toaster, push the lever and you get toast.  In Mac OS click the icon and you get music, or email, I can see where this will make my wife happy.  NOT ME!

[Murph]

Ok, I am going to install Fedora 36 Cinnamon spin on the new Galago Pro, I liked it on the Darter (before I put POP!_OS back on it), What I like about Fedora vice Manjaro or any of the Arch distros is the command syntax in terminal is pretty darn similar, and the Fedora spin on Cinnamon is pretty attractive.  I have had issues with Manjaro getting out of whack on all the systems I have put it on.  Plus the command syntax is so alien.... Sudo pacman pray to Cthulhu that I can get this package or command to work......

[Ivanhoe]

On 11/1/2022 at 1:00 PM, Murph said:

OMFG! Why does Apple have to be so bass-ackward in what they do in Mac OS!?  You cannot select all in "icon" view, but you can in "list" view in order to transfer files!?  The more I use Mac OS to get the Spouse Unit's laptop set up, the more I am glad I use Linux or Windows!  Apple and Mac OS is perfect for those folks who just want to turn it on, and it work for the very limited things they need to do, and that Apples lets them do.  It is like a toaster, push the lever and you get toast.  In Mac OS click the icon and you get music, or email, I can see where this will make my wife happy.  NOT ME!

Some IT people, particularly developers, like MacOS for reasons. I wonder if they simply go to a command line when they want to do power-user type things.

 

[Murph]

I think you are right, although apparently Apple has crippled some of the terminal functionality on the latest versions of Mac OS.  I got the wife the Macbook Air M2, and it is a nice and light device, but Mac OS is not my cup of tea.  

I tried Fedora on the Galago Pro yesterday to see if kernel 6.0 would work better, and had all sorts of issues with getting flatpak support going.  One of the issues is I removed LibreOffice 7.3.6 and wanted to install the flatpak 7.4 since I want on all my Linux machines the latest LibreOffice and Thunderbird.  I spent probably two hours attempting to get it installed with no success.  Also it is funny how some laptops just work, and work well, and you love them: Lemur Pro and HP Dev One, and then there are others that you just never warm up to no matter how decent they are.  That is me with the Galago Pro, and both Darter Pros.  They are great laptops, no doubt, but they just do not give me the fun of use that the Lemur Pro and HP Dev One do.  I know it is me, but....  

Fedora Cinnamon is really nice, and looks so much better than the POP!_OS implementation of Cinnamon.  It just would not work yesterday, so I ended up putting Mint 21 back on it.  Plus the Galago has, not terrible, but not good battery life.  It seems to be getting worse, with only 3-4 hours of use at 17% brightness on the screen with TLP enabled.  So the Galago was probably a mistake (an expensive one), I should have gotten another Lemur Pro....