NMGLUGers, in answering Leroy:
I am just now reading the release notes thoroughly. In the main my Xfce desktop is the same, with new artwork, an empty "Favorites" section of the app menu that I am adding to, and some settings set to the new defaults that I am re-tweaking. I have purged 'quodlibet' and 'exfalso' and installed 'audacious' and 'streamtuner2': this to get music streams from the Internet.
Importantly there is a syntax change in the Debian security line in /etc/apt/sources.list. This is explained in the release notes on the Debian wiki
website, and is due to apt syntax symbols.
As I have only had two days to explore and use the 32 bit laptop I cannot give a wider view just yet. I did find that there are some special versions of the installer and some unofficial versions include some firmware blobs for hardware not covered by free drivers. I had decided to give up on 32-bit computing, but as Debian supports it, I will do some more exploring on this. However, I have an even older laptop running Buster and since there is about a year of support I will let it be and discard it or pass it on at the end of a year if not sooner. The slowness of these machines and lack ability to play streaming video makes them subpar for even an average user.
Still it is fun to explore and I am happy with the upgrade so far. Thank you, Ted P