For Mister Karl Berry, requesting assistance

[Karl Berry]

Hi Lawrence - I'm afraid I cannot really parse all of your message, but
I'll try to answer what I can.

First, I know nothing about any version of suse, or any distro
repackaging of TeX Live. You'd need to contact distro maintainers about
distro issues.

Second, yes, the "original" TeX Live has had a release every year.
You can get old releases from https://tug.org/historic/ if you wish.
However, since I see nothing to be gained by installing the intervening
releases, I advise simply installing TL22:
  https://tug.org/texlive/acquire.html
This won't interfere with any existing TeX releases.

Third, it is highly unlikely that the Linux kernel version has any
relevance to TL binaries (certainly not to packages). The binaries in
our original release are intentionally compiled on old systems so as to
have the widest usage.

Fourth, there is no magic recipe for determining changes or
compatibility.  It is entirely up to each package maintainer about how
much ChangeLog-type information they provide. Usually, not much.

My own change notes for each TL release are (linked from) here:
  https://tug.org/texlive/bugs.html
but this is at a high level and concerning TL itself, not individual
packages.
  
Overleaf provides some package-level information for each release.
Here is their page for 2022:
  https://www.overleaf.com/blog/tex-live-2022-now-available
It is not feasible for anyone to provide a comprehensive list
of all changes, however.

In any case, your idea of making test documents, or running your
existing documents, would be the best way of determining the reality of
whether there are compatibility issues. If there are, you need to report
them to the package maintainers. TeX Live redistributes packages as they
arereleased to CTAN, and does not make additional changes.

Hope this helps,
Karl