Power Suspend Issue on HP EliteBook 840 G6 Notebook & 18.04 - SOLVED

Sat Apr 11 11:07:48 UTC 2020

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 14:35, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> PS: As already pointed out before, for way more than a decade almost all
> BIOS updates, if not all, are available as binaries that are neither
> Windows, Linux or any other operating system executables. Those binaries
> can be downloaded with any operating system and stored to either an USB
> stick, formatted with some common FAT or nowadays often even to any
> other drive formatted with some common FAT. In my experiences with even
> aged mobos, let alone new mobos, it is not a "common issue", but no
> issue at all.

*Wearily*

Trust me on this. We are only 25% of the way through 2020 but it has
already affected me _this year_. Remember that I work for a distro
vendor, so it is normal in our workplace that most of the machine run
only Linux and nothing else.

There must me a more elegant way to express this, but I do not know
it. It should be a maxim or a saying.

It doesn't matter how many people something works for, if it *doesn't*
work for just one person.

This is one of the axioms of computer journalism, especially
reviewing. Most people will be happy with something most of the time,
which means it doesn't really matter -- it is fine. It's when someone,
using it correctly in the approved manner, finds that it _doesn't_
work -- *that* is the problem.

E.g. I once reviewed an (I think) Siemens-Nixdorf PC. It had the
headphone socket on the front. Nice touch. But if you took the lid
off, then you found that they achieved this by routing an audio cable
from pins at the back of the machine, stretched right across the
motherboard, to a socket at the front, and it wasn't a socketed
connector, it was soldered.

To replace the motherboard, you had to remove that cable. If you
didn't note which way round it was plugged in, you could connect it
wrongly: it went both ways.

To give a minor convenience boost to the users, the makers made a
massive drop in convenience for engineers. That is a problem.  That's
bad design and that is the sort of thing a review should pick up on
and highlight.

I have a Dell PC that won't boot Linux off its own hard disk unless
Windows is on there first due to poor UEFI implementation. I have a
Thinkpad whose BIOS updates are in a Windows self-extractor which
doesn't run under WINE & can't be opened with 7zip or any other
extractor I tried -- but the Thinkpad doesn't have an MS OS on it.
When MS shipped the Office XP service pack to users on CD, the CD was
half full of self-extractors that extract to the current working
directory. They can't be installed from CD and they can't be extracted
from CD. You have to copy them to HD, then extract, then install --
which restarted the 1%-100% progress bar _seven times over_ -- and
then remove the working files.

These  are all small niggles that can be worked around, and that won't
affect most people. Those updates were designed to be downloaded, but
a 450MB download in 2001 was _huge_ -- and the person who made the
master CD that was professionally duplicated, with a hologram etc --
did not think before they did it.

These are small problems, or ones that affect only a few, but those
are the important problems.

The big ones get most people most of the time, and those ones get
caught by any vaguely professional organisation.

It's the little ones that only come up occasionally that matter.

And because of them, advice or documentation or how-tos or README
files that say "just do this" are *bad*. Because you need to think
about the edge cases. Those are the ones that make people look to the
instructions, or the mailing list, or the web fora.

UEFI problems are real and happen. Most people may never see them so
that's why it's important to talk about how to get round them: because
someone somewhere will really need that. The dozens of people who've
told me I'm wrong *are wrong* because I have seen things they have not
seen. Their conclusion is I am wrong, I am incompetent, this never
happens. They are wrong.

Do not generalise from "this works for me" to "this works". Don't go
from "I never had a problem" to "there is no problem".

Most people never get struck by lightning. But lightning _does_ strike
people, and therefore, advice on how to avoid it, like don't stand in
open areas in a thunderstorm, is important and useful advice.

I spent 25y fixing tens of thousands of PCs and Macs and servers and
obscure proprietary machines. I have seen problems most people never
dreamed about.

The fact that something is fine on 99% of PCs 99% of the time is not
important. Knowing the 1% problem that happens 1% of the time is
important. Saying it doesn't happen because you've never seen it is
not only very annoying to the people in the 1%, it is actively
harmful.

So _please_ don't. OK?

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053