My personal laptop crapped out. IDK if installing Linux Mint will fix it, but might as well try 🤷‍♀️

@Gina is it an older HP laptop by any chance? It’s a known UEFI issue on older hardware. I had the same problem on an old test machine. Fedora worked fine, but anything Ubuntu based crapped out.

Love having to download it through my work vpn.

@kev It is 😢 I hope Mint will work, I'll keep Fedora in mind.

@Gina didn't know you were a linux user 👍🏽

@nosherwan Always have :) I've tried every distro, with Mint always having been my fav. But then idk life happened, prob around the time of my thesis when I bought a new laptop and just stuck to Windows. Happy to be back.

@Gina I am shameless as I have been using Mac OS X for many years now. Said good bye to Windows as development was not easy on it.

@stroobl @kev That's interesting, I swear by HP and Lenovo laptops ever since I bought an overpriced POS Dell XPS that has been nothing but a nightmare.

Servers: Dell
Printers: Brother
Laptops: HP

@Gina
I just did the same with a very old laptop!
And then I realized, one of the reasons for buying a new one all that time ago, was broken keyboard buttons..

I want to learn Linux better. This is my step one. But what now? What do I do with an old Linux Mint laptop with a broken keyboard?

@mbreuk Uhhh buy a usb keyboard that actually works and have fun with Linux? 😁

@Gina There is also Elementary OS and Solus.

Maybe you would only need to fix your boot entries, like run update-grub to regenerate your EFI-menu.

@Gina Turn off the secure boot shizzle options in BIOS.

My crappy Acer laptop has a hidden BIOS option (press ctrl+s on the second BIOS screen to make it appear 😲🤯) that I need to switch the harddisk from Intel Optane mode to AHCI or the harddisk will not be detected.

And if I leave the laptop unplugged for too long... it will reset BIOS on boot and not detect the harddisk anymore. #lesigh

@Anachron Yeah I'm kind of using it as an excuse though, I've been wanting to install Mint for a while now 😅

@Gina well then that big issue you're having seems to justify the complete reinstallation of your operating system! ;)

@fschaap I'll try this now

@Gina Mint fixes everything. Mint is life.

Just moved my grandparents from Win 10 over to Mint because their device wouldn't support Win 11.

I kid you not they're in their 80's and they managed to buy a new printer, connect it up, and get it working with only 1 phone call at the very end to ask me for a password.

@elliotblackburn Right?? #Mint just works.

@Gina Good foundation, simple and stable UX, regular updates that don't seem to break.

I run ubuntu on my desktop for no real reason. If I ever end up re-installing the OS, that'll probably go to mint as well.

@elliotblackburn It just never sat well with me that default Ubuntu comes with an Amazon button in its menu. I get it, monies, but also meh.

@Gina @stroobl @kev

Lenovo, Dell and especially ASUS have always worked nicely for me when it comes to Linux :)

And regarding Ubuntu based distros: Linux Mint has a Debian edition - it might work around the UEFI issue :)

🥳🥳 #LinuxMint #Mint

@Gina
That's the thing. I'm not sure how to 'have fun' with Linux atm.
I'll search the web for some ideas on that. But if you have any personal fun tips, I'm all ears.

@Gina Fresh Mint, enjoy! 🌱

@Gina LPT: Always wipe/clean your laptop screen before sharing it to the world 😂

@graves501 yeah now that you mention it 😂🤢

@Gina Yay. Have a lot of fun.
So funny we are changing systems at the exact same time :)

@Gina I'd honestly never noticed it until you mentioned it, shows how observant I am! That's completely fair though, and good food for thought.

I think it was my first linux distro and so I've just always defaulted to it. I also like that I can run the desktop and server variants and they're essentially the same for development.

Mint is so similar on that vein though that it's probably where I'll go next for desktop.

@Gina hardcore linux users complain that it's not the correct choice but I keep using it. It's the distro I always get, because it just works.

@Gina @elliotblackburn I thought they got rid of that quite some time ago after all the push back from the community?

@mijndert 😂

@Gina I have a used Thinkpad that botches booting every 7th time or so... Seems to be an enterprise grade hardware issue 😅

Aw man, turns out it's not the OS, it's the harddrive. It doesn't get recognised under Disks, so it's either disconnected or dead.

Welp, guess I'll go find a screwdriver 🪛

@Gina check the time in UEFI. I don't know why, but I've known SSD/NVME drives disappear like this when the time is wrong. I think UEFI fails to see them if their last access time is in the future or something, so if the O/S is set to local time and UEFI is UTC, or the other way around, then this basically happens any time the clocks to back an hour. And an hour later they just pop back up again.

@dev_ric that's so random 😅 I'll check, but I fear that the SSD just died.

@Gina that's always possible too, of course. 😬

Jup, there's an SSD and it seems to be connected, so there's a good chance it's dead. 🥀 Now downloading Fedora to see if maybe it can find the ssd from it's install menu, that Mint wasn't able to. If that doesn't work then it's time for a new SSD.

@Gina
Storage reliability is important. If an SSD is acting up it doesn't matter if it seems mostly ok. Toss it (or use for some throwaway project) and get a new one.

@Gina if the UEFI time isn't the issue, grab an NVME to USB adapter and when you're booted into a Linux distro, plug it in as a USB drive and see what dmesg spits out. If it's file system errors, maybe forcing an fsck on it will work? 🤷‍♂️

Or it might just mount the data partitions well enough to at least rescue files from it.

Nope, no disk in Fedora either. RIP SSD.

@Gina F

@Gina But you got a verified and current backup, right?

@madalex hahah wouldn't that be nice.

@Gina F.

This kind of 'sudden death' is what terrifies me personally, to the point where I try to take multiple backups of everything. But we can only do so much 😅

@Gina Well, I got one of those mugs:

https://shop.heise.de/tasse-kein-backup-kein-mitleid

Probably deformation professionnelle on my part to ask about the backup when the topic data loss comes up in any context. 😜

@stroobl I can use it for an entire working day, no problem. It’s not as good as my M1 Mac, but it was never going to be. It’s certainly good enough for my needs though.

@Gina

@Gina

> Laptop with Linux Mint logo

That's a good sign!

@Gina I once had a laptop where the SSD rattled loose. You tried unplugging the SSD and plugging it back in, I guess?

@Gina

> Multimedia Codecs
> You need at least 15.5 GB disk space to install Linux Mint.
> This computer has only 8.1 GB.

That's a bad sign...

(also, #Alt4You)