Alright, must be a bad stick. Tried an NTFS USB 3.0 stick and everything on that one came out looking fine even though I didn't do anything else to make any of the files work. Even that weird text file from mousepad came out looking fine, so here's that info (finally).

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cat.resolve.terminal.txt (1.5 KB, 11 views)

forget the below
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are being used anyway

right now I have no ideas


odd,

the image could be corrupted if you pulled the stick out before it was synced
but I wouldn't expect plain text to behave quite the same way ( just shorter than it should be )

this "corruption" ( by systemd-resolved ) could be the root cause of the problem.

it just so happens that 8.8.8.8 is google's open DNS

if you were to edit /etc/resolv.conf ( as root )
and add

Code:

nameserver 8.8.8.8

above
nameserver 127.0.0.53

it may give you enough time to run updates and hopefully fix the problem with systemd-resolved

( eventually that file will revert to pre-edited version )

Not really. Lines likeshould appear in the /etc/systemd/resolv.conf file. You would not run that as a command, it is a setting to be read from the file by the systemd software or service.

Alright, thanks for all of your input, but I've decided to go ahead and give up on this endeavor of getting the Wifi and LAN module to work on this laptop. During the weekend I did some more research, tried a few more things, but nothing changed. Simply couldn't get things working as they should regardless if I swapped files, used systemd during boot, or booted without systemd. Finally, in frustration and just to make sure that it wasn't some sort of weird hardware defect, I went ahead and used one of my Windows 10 Pro licences on the laptop ... which worked without a hitch. LAN is working, WiFi is working, all of the updates downloaded & installed without a problem, so this time around I have to give kudos to Windows 10.
Such a shame, just couldn't get it done with Linux.

I'll add this much ... I've been using every version of Windows professionally since Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and I switched over to Linux for myself full-time in 2009. It really amazes me how out of all of the previous Windows versions, the Windows 10 Desktop has a very distinct feel & responsiveness to it, not much different from Ubuntu, Mint, or MX Linux (probably others too). There's no doubt in my mind that Microsoft took a long hard look at the guts of Linux, to make Windows 10 perform as it does ... completely different from any other Windows that I've used in the past.
Thanks again for your efforts everyone.

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