No offense but if you had built in and then did an in-place upgrade to a newer kernel, etc, I would not be surprised that things break. These days, I'm as like

No offense but if you had built in and then did an in-place upgrade to a newer kernel, etc, I would not be surprised that things break. These days, I'm as likely to do an in-place upgrade in Linux as I am in Windows. It's far too insanely easy to just have a separate /home partition and do a clean install. Apt makes it easy to restore packages. You still have to rebuild the wifi module, but it shouldn't be any more work than the first time.