It seems that the 5.15 kernel is needed to run Debian-based systems with RTL8821CE.

On the Devuan Xfce system, I tried dpkg-ing the .deb file again, but then I was informed that kernel headers were missing.

And things could be worse. A Linux Mint MATE system I created the same way on another external SSD has completely died, refusing to boot with never-ending "read-only filesystem" errors.

Maybe this laptop is Arch-only for external systems. Good thing the extra SSDs were bought cheap.

@Head_on_a_Stick

Thanks so much for that. I was rooting around in /etc/apt, but I never looked in /etc/apt/sources.list.d, which is where the offending file was.

Thanks for the replies, but we seem to be talking past each other. I know about appimage, but that won't help me now, as apt won't run. What is the full pathname for the config file I need to edit?

UPDATE: I went to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d and deleted home-ungoogled_chromium.gpg, which allowed me to do update/upgrade, but I still see errors on update. I think I'll wipe the drive and reinstall.

Sorry, I was a bit obtuse. The leads were provided by alexkemp: kid3 and exfalso. The former appears to do what I need, so I'm playing around with it.

kid3 looks promising, as it has a GUI somewhat similar to Windows Properties popup. I'll play with that.

@Camtaf

Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that my primary music is classical, for which metadata is often wrong, hence why I want to edit it.

I tried the chown command HOAS suggested, but it didn't work, complaining that there was nothing in /media/"$USER"/ and it was correct, there was nothing there even though the HDD was running and connected vis USB.

Then I tried the same trick on a USB flash drive. It had some strange stuff on it from Windows, so I formatted the drive using gnome-disk-utility and created a partition table & partitioned to FAT32 using GParted -- and I can copy files to it. And there's a directory in /media/"$USER"/ with the new name of the USB flash drive. There's something about EXT4.

@golinux

Uh, oh, if the moderator has trouble doing it, it's not trivial.

@Head_on_a_Stick

Your use of the word mount confuses me. I don't want to mount it when I use it; I want to simply connect it via USB and access it, like I do with HDDs I create in Windows. Accessing an NTFS HDD in Linux is obscene, with CPU approaching 100% simply for writing to the drive. I figured that creating an EXT4 HDD would be more efficient.

Here's my sequence of commands for a 500 GB HDD:

sudo shred -vn 1 /dev/sda

use GParted to create an ms-dos partition table and single EXT4 partition.

Try to copy a directory to the newly formatted HDD.

I have screenshots of Gparted and failed copy, but I have no idea how to attach them, as there does not appear to be a way to do that, The text of the error message is "The folder <somename> cannot be copied because you do not have permissions to create it in the destination."

I guess I'll just live with the obscene access via NTFS.

Here is the final report.

I installed Crucial Ballistix memory (it has a thin aluminum strip covering the chips to serve as a heatsink). Maybe it'll keep those temps lower. It is a matched set of 8 GB each, so performance can only improve.

I drilled a few holes in the bottom case under the NVMe SSD. It can only improve the airflow, especially considering that it's located at the far corner of the laptop with no otherwise ventilation.

But the biggest bang for the buck was with the processor. My old HP laptop has a copper heatsink and bar, but this new one has a thin aluminum one. Damn those beancounters! When I removed the heatsink, I found a glob of thermal paste. It wasn't hard or crusty, just applied far too thick. When I applied a thin coating of Noctua thermal paste, the temps dropped around 25 degrees!

It was a hardware problem all along.

@Head_on_a_Stick

Yeah, this is a funny laptop. I bought it from Newegg, which advertised it as refurbished, whatever that means. I really think it is gray-market from Asia. It has a truly matte screen, which for me is a hard requirement, as well as an NVMe SSD and AMD Ryzen 5 processor. The vents are pretty much a joke, really tiny holes that could not possible transfer much air. I'm going to drill-out the outer ring of vent holes to improve the airflow. When I do that, I'll make sure the fan is not obstructed.

Well, that's curious. On a lark, I uninstalled Britty because I'm not blind, uninstalled Clamav and Clamtk because antivirus often uses lots of processor resources, and Gnome Software which I didn't remember installing (but I'm sure I did). The fan is now quiet. It appears that Clam was the problem all along, which is highly ironic.

UPDATE: I spoke way too soon. When I wrote the above, no browser was running. Now that I started using browsers again, the fan is once again running. Time to take the back cover off.