That’s definitely a frustrating situation you have, and I very much encourage you to take the path that feels most possible to you!

Before moving on, I would like to point to trying what u/mvirts suggested, disabling ACPI from the grub bootloader. It’s easy and great for getting an installer running and working, and sometimes the freshly installed and updated OS whisks the problem away.

But regardless of what you choose, I wish you much luck in your endeavours!

Agreed with others that this is likely a BIOS issue, and it would be good to check for a firmware update first.

In particular, this looks like it might be an issue with the USB port locations described by your BIOS ACPI. Maybe one of the embedded root hubs? You might be able to play with USB settings in the BIOS Config to see if that helps, especially loading default values. I also think it might be possible to blacklist ports from kernel parameters and that could be a good check… but I’m not very familiar with the parameters in recent years and didn’t find anything in a quick search.

As a last ditch, you can disable ACPI entirely, but it can/will cause very odd performance and configuration issues along with no power management. (This goes double for portable systems.)

Agreed, it’s definitely coming from the top! I didn’t realize they had closed a ton of the other offices during the pandemic, but I suppose it’s not surprising either. It also seemed like a lot of remote hiring happened during the pandemic?

Most of the people I know personally affected are in that category (remotely hired or relocated), and most of those people are women. Small sample size with lots of bias, but I’ve been pretty upset the whole situation. It definitely feels/looks like a way to quietly push a bunch of folks out… whether overtly or as a “bonus” for upper management, it has the same unfortunate effect.

I guess it is what it is, but what it is ain’t good. It feels good to commiserate though, thank you stranger!