Re: Bookworm updates killing WiFi

On 23/06/2025 22:39, Chris Elvidge wrote:

On 23/06/2025 at 15:38, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

I've been complaining here about WiFi problems for some time and it's
finally dawned on me that rfkill is a frequent visitor to the scene.
>
Is it plausible that running the "updates available" routine somehow
un-sets the WiFi region selection? The selections look unchanged, but
re-running the configuration seems to fix WiFi operation.
>
Thanks for reading!
>
bob prohaska
>

 After much pissing about with Bookworm + Pi Zero 2W - losing wifi regularly - even tried replacing NetworkManager with dhcpcd - I went back to Bullseye (11). No problems at all in the last week. No NetworkManager (well disabled) bur dhcpcd working.
 

I have found Bookworm on a Pi ZeroW to be less than confidence inspiring.
I have 2 i7 laptops, 2 Xeon VMs and an i5 desktop all running Bookworm without problems. Runs just like any Debian distro should and all were upgraded in situ from Bullseye without issue. Follow the instructions to the letter and everything just worked.
The Pi ZeroW was updated the same way which is against the Raspbian/PIOS guide (can't remember what it is called any more).  The upgrade worked but it turned to be a mishmash of old and NetworkManager networking. I don't know or care why it ended up this way, I simply restarted from a clean Bookworm image and made changes etc. to get it the way I like.
Since then it's been anything but great. Sure what is installed works and stays working but every update/upgrade feels like juggling hand grenades with greasy hands. I now expect something to fail every upgrade and that when it actually works I get a pleasant surprise.
Last update had all sorts of initramfs errors now fixed.
Bookworm behaves perfectly on amd64 hardware.
YMMV