Sounds like CMOS battery dying/dead on the motherboard. It stores BIOS settings, including password and clock. (Though you really should be using ntpd)

Unless you have . in your $PATH

Yepp. Started using Debian around the Ham/Slink releases, haven’t found any reason to change yet.

Yepp, and no one really listens to the others, just trying to remember what you did and make sure no one dumps more work on you.

now that IPv6 has been adopted globally.

Now that is a quality joke

Why not just go full WSL?

If you live in a city and have no backyard or similar, you should not be allowed to own a dog.