This has been going on for some months where regardless of whether I
use fwupdtool or GNOME Software available firmware updates are shown,
downloaded, and a reboot offered, alas when I reboot these updates are
not installed.

After running whatever update tool, updates are present under
/boot/efi/EFI/opensuse/fw.

After reboot they are gone - but apparently not installed (and indeed
there is nothing unusual during the power on and boot sequence, like I
believe I saw in the past when firmware updates were applied):

% ls -l /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse/fw
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  1243680 Apr  1 16:09
fwupd-279599d4-78c7-4c99-84ea-4a7c8d2b10e1.cap
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  9431077 Apr  1 16:09
fwupd-4e78ce68-5389-4a95-bf10-e3568c30caf8.cap
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 28843840 Apr  1 16:09
fwupd-a0fd4aef-f691-4c90-a089-7dd4f4481db0.cap

% ls -l /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse/
total 4,5M
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 847k Apr  1 03:39 MokManager.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   58 Apr  1 03:39 boot.csv
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,1k Apr  1 16:09 fw
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  64k Feb 25  2023 fwupdx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  203 Apr  1 03:39 grub.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2,1M Apr  1 03:39 grub.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 541k Apr  1 03:39 grubx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 935k Apr  1 03:39 shim.efi


Asking naively: is /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse/fw the right directory for
these updates to be put in? It looks is if they are not "found", yet
"something" removes them upon startup?

Hardware is a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8.