Yes. there's more to tell. Those of us following this story were left with the impression that my DELL Precision laptop was the victim of a bad update, or a flawed installation, as it stopped connecting to my BT mouse and keyboard. But I've learned more, and I've decided to tell what I've learned and how I learned it in a thread where it's not off-topic (for the thread).
I'm actually typing this on my big laptop, after getting sick and tired of trying to deal with my daily workflow on the little Travelmate I've talked about before. Its Celeron single-core processor is just too slow, and its screen resolution too small to be much good for anything but reading email on vacation in motel rooms.
As you last knew, the big laptop was totally unusable because its black screen wouldn't allow doing anything at all with it, Including not being able to use the F12 boot menu to make sure it was trying to boot somethig useful. It sat on the floor near my chair al night, while I tried to get on with my life using the little laptop.
For some reason, I felt compelled to try turning it on this morning, and for some unexplainable reason the screen lit up with a Plasma logon. Still no BT connectivity, of course, but with its i7 processor and UHD screen, it beat the crap out of the Travelmate, even if I did need to use a non-BT mouse and keyboard with it.
I launched a Budgie "live" ISO, and it gave me access to BT, just as that had the night before. It occurred to me that I might be able to go ahead and install Budgie, and NOT take a chance on updating it, if that would get me access to BT for the next 3 days until my new laptop arrives. After all, most of the data I need to configure a computer is on my NAS, which I could access with a file browser, so it wouldn't be a huge task.
Long story short(er), I installed Budgie, and did a very brief configuration of just what I needed for three days, but I had to use Firefox, as ffmpeg-chromium wasn't in the repository, and that prevented installing Vivaldi. So I took a chance and updated Budgie, installed Vivaldi with no errors, and configured it. Delighted with my progress so far, I took another chance and rebooted.
Now I had no BT, and my mouse and keyboard wouldn't work. So it wasn't a corrupted installation, nor was is something wrong with Plasma, and it likely wasn't a bad update (no one else had complained) -- all of our best guesses the night before.
Deciding that using the non-BT mouse and keyboard wouldn't be the end of the world (for three days), again I changed course and replaced Budgie with a Plasma installation. And I updated it. After all this, I'm now back to where I started, three days ago, with an updated Plasma installation with no BT, that I've configured as before.
This story hasn't ended yet. I'll let you know how things go after I receive and configure the Latitude, if you're still interested. If you're not, at least you can avoid reading this thread, and keep on reading Distro Reviews, knowing it's back on-topic for good.
