it took me more searching than i feel i should have had to do, but i found a guide to attempt the fedora 43 upgrade from a terminal, so i'm doing that over SSH right now.
turns out that, going by advice i was given by someone else last month, it *WAS* due to wine being installed (terminal was throwing "inferior architecture" warnings and aborting). removing wine-dxvk* with dnf and starting over seems to be progressing.
love when i can tell a hand-off has just been made; the ethernet interface's job is done, now is time for the CPU to do its duty
it is now at the point that it wants me to sudo dnf5 offline reboot - I will want to be there in person for that. excuse me a moment