copying all chrome config data to different user

[Liam Proven]

On 23 March 2018 at 16:25, David L <david4lists at gmail.com> wrote:

The thing is this, and it's very simple.

I started doing paid professional tech support in 1988. I've been
doing it for Ubuntu since 2004.

I've supported more different apps, OSes and platform than I can
remember. I was a jaded senior-level guy at this before home dial-up
internet had been invented in the UK; I was in the forum where the
founders of the UK's first commercial ISP thrashed out the idea.

Happily, I no longer do it for a living.

I do it for free, because I like and use Ubuntu and for me it is a
good way of giving something back. I try to help the community.

But none the less, I am still a pro, and still a rather jaded and
grumpy old one.

So, yes, I will try to help people here, if I can, but you are getting
the assistance for free.

If someone is paying me lots of money for my assistance, I may, if
they can persuade me that what they want to do is a legitimate thing,
go out of my way to help them to do something which seems to be
foolish or misguided.

But not always.

So, for instance, when in about 1990, a woman came to me because her
word-processor was broken, this is what I found.

She was a trained typist. She used hard carriage returns. Everywhere.
She never let the WP word-wrap; every line ended in a hard CR.

Her printer wore out. She bought a new printer. Its default font was
slightly bigger than the same-named font on her old printer. So those
lines no longer fitted. The WP knew this an obediently wrapped each
line, so a word or 2 ended up on the next line.

I told her, sorry, you've been using your word processor wrongly.
There's nothing I can do to fix this. The printer didn't support
different font sizes (it was a very long time ago), and there was no
way to globally change the font. The WP didn't have a facility to
search-and-replace line endings. So she had to go and hand-edit
hundreds of lines in thousands of documents, many on hundreds of
floppies, because she'd been doing it wrong for years.

As it happened, the way she was doing it wrong worked, for a while,
for one specific combination of hardware. But change that, and she had
a big problem, and one I could not fix for her.

She made a formal complaint to my boss's boss.

I told him what happened. He laughed a lot, and told her I was right.
She complained to her boss, who was her husband. He came to my boss,
and my boss managed to explain what she'd done -- not a trivial task
-- and her husband understood. He agreed that she was rather dogmatic,
and had refused any training or instruction on using word processors
because she was so sure she knew typing from using typewriters.

He sighed and accepted that the problem was of her creation, making it
his problem, and thanked us.

So. I don't know what you're doing. If I took the time and you spent a
while explaining it, and you were paying me for this, and I felt that
there was a valid reason, then I might help. But as a consultant, I
also had to tell my clients "no, that is wrong. You are using the tool
incorrectly, and I will not help."

For instance, in 2012 with a company who formatted 50+ page reports by
copying-and-pasting every line of formatting from the previous report
into the new one in word. "With practice, it only takes a few hours,"
they explained.

I told them no.

They wouldn't listen, took it to management.

So I showed them how stylesheets work and I reformatted a 75 page
report in about 7 seconds by applying a stylesheet to it.

They were astounded, amazed, shocked. They realised they'd wasted
weeks or months of time over years.

But they kept doing it, because it was the only way they knew.

I stopped working with that client.

But when I am doing this kind of support for free: no.

I try not to be rude or hostile, but I am blunt by nature.

So, in this case, my response to your latest email is to highlight this bit:

> 3) Boot up, log in, and open each of your 100 chrome profiles via the GUI

... and say, I don't know what you are doing with 100 Chrome profiles,
but whatever it is, you've probably using a rotten way of doing it and
you should find another way. If you need 100 different profiles, and
you're trying to manually replicate those profiles across multiple
different OS installs or machines or whatever, then you need to
fundamentally reconsider what you're doing and how you're doing it,
because this is a foolish thing to be doing.

(For instance, if you used a network server and network login
accounts, each account could have a different profile on a single
server, each account containing a Chrome profile. Multiple client
machines could connect to the same set of accounts on the server,
allowing access to those accounts from different machines/OSes/distro
versions.)

But if you're trying to manually sync them all? I don't know what
you're doing, but I am willing to tell you that in my considered
professional experience, you are very likely doing it wrong.

So no, I won't go out of my way to analyse the problem.

So far, you've had GBP 75 worth of my time. Most of it on this email.

If you don't like the answer, well, tough. You got it for free. You
get all the consultancy expertise and professional courtesy that you
are paying for.

If you actually listened, I suspect that you could save yourself hours
or days of work.

Instead, you're complaining at me, just like the lady with the hard
carriage-returns.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
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