Sigh, not seeing the forest…

I disk image systems before upgrades but most people can't do that.

I have little time and can't afford to spend 2 days tracking down why my updated GPU driver causes the main app I use to overlay fuzzy squares on everything. If it works I minimize change until I have some contingency time in hand. Since home desktop and laptop systems are effectively all unique (hw+sw+config combo) there's always a chance of mess.

Since my last Ubuntu update for example I'm having some frustrating issues with both Firefox and with Electron based apps experiencing periodic display glitches. No time to deep dive on it at the moment so I put up with it. Last update my laptop display server started freezing when unplugged form the external display. The one before that, it would periodically fail to suspend or resume... and this is pretty well supported hardware on a widely used distro. Admittedly the nVidia GPU is a significant part of the problem, one I'm usually able to avoid but wasn't with this model, but still.

The windows systems I have to maintain are even worse because they aggressively force significant updates. They're infrequently used so they're often pretty much disabled by immediately forced updates when I do boot them every few months...