Brainstorming, preparing for new laptop

[DoYouKubuntu]

DoYouKubuntu Is this thread relevant anymore? Can I close it?

Feel free to close it, Snowhog! It's all good now. Thanks.

[Snowhog]

DoYouKubuntu Is this thread relevant anymore? Can I close it?

[pwabrahams]

WARNING!!! If you already have a Dropbox account and are installing Dropbox on a new machine, be very careful. If you don't do it right, you'll induce a full sync that will have the effect of bringing in a lot of ancient stuff that you really don't want cluttering up your machine. You need to start with a selective sync. I don't know the best way to achieve that, though.

[MoonRise]

So far, I've played wit Ventoy on a lot of system types. It's been a great tool to use to review different Distros. Most I reviewed were KDE or XFCE based. Mostly cosmetic in look.

Anyway, hope your path goes well DYK!

[GreyGeek]

I resized my Neon BTRFS partition from 465Gb to 405GB and then shrunk the partition. Then I created another partition out of that 60GB and installed Manjaro on it.
Since my Neon was on sda1 and the boot was installed on sda, I installed Manjaro to sda3 and boot on sda as well. I expected Manjaro to see the existing grub and add itself to it. It didn't. It behaved like Windows. I expected to be able to destroy the sda3 partition and and use the partition manager to expand the sda2 partition to take up the 60GB. Having done that I rebooted and got an error about grub being a special Arch file, which Neon couldn't read, and then a msg about not finding a kernel just before Its grub_rescue> prompt, which had no commands of any sort.

I booted into Neon on Ventoy and used install-mbr to add mbr to the first 512 bytes. Then I replaced @ with my last Neon snapshot and rebooted.
After I rebooted, I got the BSOD at the login window, which never showed the login screen. My nvidia driver never loaded. After several retries, including doing a fresh install of Neon to the bare SSD, I kept getting the BSOD. The SSD formatting was hosed.

So, I used dd to wipe the entire SSD with zeros. And started over with a fresh install. Instead of using my btrfs script I installed TimeShift and made a couple of snapshots.
A little while later I created a second snapshot and told TimeShift to rollback to the first snapshot. It wouldn't boot up.
I did another fresh install and repeated my manual recovery process. After I used mc to copy @home/jerry into @/home/jerry I deleted the line in fstab that loaded @home to /home. So now I am back to using my snapshot script and the results of which I am using right now. It wasn't as much work or take as much time as it appears, since I could restore my home account files with a simple copy command using mc. Copying from one SSD to another is blazing FAST!.

Manjaro? Change everything back to Breeze light (which is what I use) and it would be hard to tell the difference between Manjaro and Kubuntu or Neon.
The systemd-analyze time was 5.8sec. My time, runnin Nvidia, is

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.094s (kernel) + 1.417s (userspace) = 4.512s
graphical.target reached after 1.392s in userspace

Not too shabby.
I only moved to Neon to get a little closer to the leading (not the bleeding) edge and I like what I am getting. As a rolling release I will keep it rolling along.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I've got perhaps a dozen ISO's from various distro on my 695GB rust bucket and I used it today to save my bacon when Manjaro barfed a lung on me.

Oh no! What happened, GG?!

[GreyGeek]

Not sure if relevant anymore on this topic, but I can say, as far as using bootable USB media, I recently stumbled on the below little tool. Works great and boots from ISO instead of having to 'dd' them or anything else.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

I've got perhaps a dozen ISO's from various distro on my 695GB rust bucket and I used it today to save my bacon when Manjaro barfed a lung on me.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Not sure if relevant anymore on this topic, but I can say, as far as using bootable USB media, I recently stumbled on the below little tool. Works great and boots from ISO instead of having to 'dd' them or anything else.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Thanks for the info, MoonRise! I still haven't decided how I'm going to install K on the new laptop. I'll take a look!

[MoonRise]

Not sure if relevant anymore on this topic, but I can say, as far as using bootable USB media, I recently stumbled on the below little tool. Works great and boots from ISO instead of having to 'dd' them or anything else.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

[DoYouKubuntu]

Never mind. I have PopOS! on Ventroy so I booted into it. It's not plasma, its some form of Gnome! The file manager is not Dolphin.

I must've installed Dolphin when I was using the loaner before, since it apparently doesn't come by default.

Did you installl Plasma-dekstop on top of PopOS!

No, I haven't. And didn't know I could/should/would want to. Keeping in mind that my UTMOST concern right now is to not screw anything up, is it worth the bother? This is a very temporary situation and, as I've noted, I can live with these minor inconveniences until my new laptop arrives.

[GreyGeek]

Never mind. I have PopOS! on Ventroy so I booted into it. It's not plasma, its some form of Gnome! The file manager is not Dolphin.
Did you installl Plasma-dekstop on top of PopOS!

[GreyGeek]

What does
kcmshell5 mouse
give you?

[DoYouKubuntu]

How to make Dolphin single click:
Open System Settings
Select Workspace Behavior
Select General Behavior
The section which reads "Clicking files or folders:" is to obtuse. The first radio button is single click, the second is double click.

Are you sure you're referring to Pop? Because mine doesn't have anything REMOTELY resembling that. I can post screenshots if necessary. There are two distinct choices on its menu, one for "Settings" and one for "System." Neither has anything like that.

One year, uh? You are more patient than I am.

Ha ha! I'm pretty patient in general. The only thing that really irritates me is stupidity. Or when someone is being intentionally obtuse. With this situation, the way it all played out, I really assumed from the get-go that *I* was somehow at fault. I mean, if you plod back through my copious descriptions of the issues I had, it always seemed like maybe I hadn't installed something, or installed it incorrectly, or had some kind of conflict because of the programs I use, or something. It really took a while to sink in that it most likely was just a lemon. But, you know, considering that I'm 60+ and this is the FIRST real lemon I've ever had, in any category, I think that's pretty good!

BTW, my memory actually served me correctly! It was October 23rd last year when my laptop arrived. And on the 23rd THIS year, it left in its original box, which I had saved (I always save computer boxes--I'm not exactly sure WHY, but I just always do).

[GreyGeek]

How to make Dolphin single click:
Open System Settings
Select Workspace Behavior
Select General Behavior
The section which reads "Clicking files or folders:" is to obtuse. The first radio button is single click, the second is double click.

One year, uh? You are more patient than I am.

[DoYouKubuntu]

You're the customer paying $$$, not a member of their quality control staff. I don't know what the rates are now but my rates before I retired were $120/hr or $1K per day in court plus expenses, plus everything in writing with a signed contract.

Yeah, but there's really nothing here to warrant anything like that! It's up to me, if I want to install K (or something else) I'm free to, my choice. I think I'll just leave it as is. I can live with the little inconveniences for a week or two.

If anyone who's had experience with Pop can help, I'd appreciate knowing how to make Dolphin single-click and, especially, how to make the clock show my preferred date/time format. On K, I enter this in its settings: ddd MMM dd yyyy -- which yields: Sat Oct 23 2021. Using the clock's own settings, I make it look like this: 11:23:27AM

Want to hear something really ironic? I believe it was a year ago today that I received the Gazelle. (I may be wrong on the date, but 10/23 stuck in my head for some reason.)