Have you ever upgraded the Ubuntu laptop? Cause that’s my main gripe with Ubuntu. Server upgrades work, desktop upgrades never did for me.

I wonder about this. I have been running Ubuntu on one of my laptops for years, and updated it several times withouth hitch. All the way from around 18.10 to 22.04 (non-lts, so I upgraded to every release) until the laptop was replaced.

Usually the breakage happens if one has tons of shitty third-party repos and thus will get package conflicts when upgrading. And those are solved by removing/replacing all software installed from those repos and then after upgrade reinstalling them again if needed.

Can you access your wan ip when you are somewhere else than on your own lan?

If not, then this is probably just that your router does firewalling and nat is such order that you can access admin interface from local network via wan address.

If yes, then router has some serious misconfiguration.