Connecting your Nexus 5 to Linux desktop

I'm trying to consolidate my communications a good bit. One step was to purchase a used LG Nexus 5 and connect it to the Ting network. I'm getting things set up and straightened out and I finally plugged in the phone to my computer, and it showed up ... but I wasn't fully connected. I couldn't copy anything over to my phone.

I tried a bunch of solutions:

  1. Like this.
  2. and this
  3. and this

I'm poking around one of those solutions and then I made a change, and all of a sudden my LinuxMint installation saw the phone and auto-mounted. To tell the truth, I had tried several things so it's impossible for me to tell you exactly the steps to resolve your situation, but here's the kicker that got things working for me:

  1. Get your phone in Developer mode by ...

    1. Settings > About phone > Build number
    2. Start tapping on "Build number" 7 times
    3. ... until it says "You are now a Developer!"
  2. Settings > Developer Options > Networking (Section) > Select USB Configuration
  3. PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol

Boom! Showed up in Linux. Copy files to your heart's content!