Took roughly three hours because meanwhile I was doing other chores and only passed by the laptop roughly every 15 minutes to enable successive stages of the updates. It passed three complete versions of the OS until it finally installed the current version.
Everything went well, the machine is running smoothly and up to date now.
Ah right we should inform comedians, since everyone is so offended by harmless joking in 2025. Dude, it is(was) Dull Men’s Club…assumption being it is men here, that are dull, and are boring their wives talking about Linux. (I understand that some men may have husbands, and many women contribute to Linux use and FOSS maintenance, and Maybe your wife or husband likes talking about Copy on Write Filesystem OS choices, but stats say many people do not want to hear about OS choices, and stats say in a “men’s” group the majority would have a wife that falls into that Venn diagram–as opposed to a husband.