I changed the subject line from "Secure shell from/to laptop [RESOLVED--Partially" to a more specific one because in all my many years of using SSH, I've never had to specify.
I've read through the thread, and is common after a while it gets difficult to keep track of everything that's been done and/or in what order and what the results were, so I offer this step-by-step method of troubleshooting what seems to be a problem of an incompatible list of available ssh ciphers between the client & server most likely due to different versions of SSH. Firstly, I'd suggest running the ssh command w. the -vvv option as it will provide the most data feedback at each step of the ssh connection encryption process. 1. This provides the sshd version #'s for both sides. e.g. ssh -vvv admin@DESTINATION_COMPUTER OpenSSH_4.3p2, OpenSSL 0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 01 Jul 2008 debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config This helps to confirm the OpenSSH is version 4.3p2 on the system and further below we have the destination system’s version: debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_6.6.1 debug1: match: OpenSSH_6.6.1 pat OpenSSH* 2. It also provides the list of HMACs available for use on the client/local side. To get the list of HMACs available for the server/remote side run the command: sshd -vvv localhost 3. With the sent section from the same destination machine, you can see the entire list of all available hmacs (unless restricted in the configuration). 4. From this output, create a simple matrix of "Sent HMACs, "Available HMACs, and "ALL HMACs" 5. Then take the few matching hmacs and add it to the current list of available hmacs. 6. Then update the value for MACs below in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart the SSHD service on the destination system. Reference with more example output and explanation of each step - https://yetanothercharacterkb.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/ssh-fails-with-no-matching-mac-found/ HTH!
