Real life...

Lot of maintenance to network and Internet equipment, then a certain HP laptop.

I also started using Linux on my main laptop, and it's much more responsive than when it was on Windows 10. I still keep the install, because ~7 years' worth of cruft is on that install, which has gone through three laptops so far!

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Routers have been upgraded from OpenWrt:
22.03.5 -> 23.05.0
and wireless signals have improved slightly, so has stability; no random disconnects on certain clients so far. Also, switched CPU governor from:
schedutil -> ondemand
and made a few tweaks to the ondemand settings... more responsive now. And... the minimum CPU frequency has been changed from 437500 to 600000 due to possible stability issues with the 2.4GHz radio and startup issues. Haven't had those myself, but it is preemptive.