15 February 2026

The continual drive to 'improve' things is simply counter productive if one looses the core functionality that we have had for 30+ years now. I first started using SUSE linux back in the version 5/6 days nearly 30 years ago. The disks only went in the recycling recently as I try to downsize an excess of historic material. I switched from the openSUSE Leap to Tumbleweed as it offered better control of things like the PHP builds and more recent other packages which were not easily supported on Leap. I accept that there will be things broken from time to time, but it seems that this is now happening following every update. Currently the wireless broadband is no longer working as the mt7921e module will not load and I can't see how to fix it. It's only a backup which HAS been useful when openreach break the newly installed fibre, but at least it allowed me to carry on working while the land line was out for days! In addition to no wifi, the LibreOffice has been screwed up with the 'global menu' now appearing on the start bar rather than in the active window. Something to do with all the faffing around with just how windows work? I'm still floating between my nice stable X11 graphics base and Wayland. NEITHER currently work without problems and some applications work better in one than the other ... why? Whilst I've been wasting a LOT of time trying to fix things that were woking happily, at least even when I hit a 'grub rescue>' prompt after an attempt to fix the wireless connection I managed to resture normal operation. All the raw material is safe on a second disk so even if I end up doing a clean install of the OS I'm fairly safe and everything is mirrored to the two text only servers as well. However the threat that yast will be switched off soon is something of a problem since I use that extensivly to manage the servers over ssh! It's text based user interface simply works and while I can do some actions the old command line way, it's been a while and the old grey cells are slow and failing these days.
Perhaps time to take stock and switch to a LTS desktop and only worry about manually updating the key operational stack of nginx, PHP and firebird?