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I get the impression that my issue is either not technically interesting or I am too dense to provide the correct information that would make my situation more "diagnosable" (or both) which either way ok, I'm relying on free help so fair enough -  hopefully once I clear this hurdle future questions might be more interesting?
Regardless, I have a box that I have, thus far, been unable to get working so I am starting to considering some sort of paid option but honestly the year long "OPNsense Business Support Subscription" @ €329. which seems to be the cheapest, feels like a bit much for one home network (though admittedly big) issue.
Are there any other options cheaper out there that anyone is aware of?
Thanks in advance.

So, I have a protectli box with opnsense 23.7.5 installed, currently I have the ISP router/modem in front of the opnsense box and a laptop (which I have been dual booting between win/lin) to try to get things setup.
I am able to access sites like google.com, cloudflare, but also bing, facebook, and apparently opnsense.org via the linux laptop I have connected but that is about it - other sites like wikipedia.org or reddit.com (pretty much any other site) just give me a "cant connect to server" error. In Win I can't even access opnsense - it just times out and tells me 192.168.1.1 took too long to respond.
I can not ping 1.1.1.1 from the opnsense console nor from the computer I have connected to opnsense, it just tells me no route to host and 100% packet loss - so its that rules out DNS?

I have tried ticking so many boxes and have reset back to defaults so many times that starting to feel like pulling my hair out over this and can't figure what I am doing wrong, I am so hoping to just get the most basic setup going (access websites) and then back that up so I can try to figure the other things out.

Please. Please help - I will post whatever log info is needed but I didn't want to just willy nilly post useless info so please let me know and I will happily post it.

I am quite pressed for cash at the moment but really want to setup an opensense router (as my old router died so I have the option of buying some cheap less-than-ideal off the shelf router or opensense on an old laptop). I do have an old 8460p HP elitebook that, in its day at least, was quite the beast. I was thinking with 16gb mem, an old i7, and gigabit ethernet it would have ample horsepower but I was:
1) Not sure if it was realistic/compatible.
2) Not sure about coupling it with a usb2ethernet dongle on a 3.0 usb port would be workable.
I found one unanswered post asking about this generally, and another posting about problems with a ethernet/usb dongle.
Any general thoughts or experiences would be super appreciated.
Thanks in advance.