Well yesterday was a real nightmare, but I seem to be making good progress today. It's p'ing with rain, so I decided to sit down quietly and have another look at open SuSe. I liked the ideas of having a bleeding edge installation ( Tumbleweed ), and a slightly older stable version ( Leap ). I decided to install the Leap version with Gnome, and leave out a few things like Libre. Well the only problem seems to be that it decided that I ought to have Libre, so it has installed it. Everything else seems to be working perfectly. The only inconvenience is that I have to connect to the WiFi manually, but I can live with that. In fact I'm making this post on the installed system.
My SSD hasn't been delivered yet, so I might leave the Bitcoin node test until tomorrow. (now arrived ).
I've installed snap, and used that to install and start Bitcoin core ( how's that for a volte face ). It looks as if it is going to work well, but I haven't defined the blockchain directory, as there is only 22Gb of free space on ther internal HDD. I'll put together the SSD, and copy the files from my external HDD, then I'll see how that gets on with sync'ing.
ps - right now I'm in love with open SuSe, but will I stay faithful.