No installer, I downloaded the Linux version from the main site many years ago.
On the wiki, my installation is cutely referred to as an Independent Install.
I have .tar.xz downloads for 0.16.36 and 0.17.23, so I am guessing that according to the timestamp 31 March 2019 was the last time that I ...

Is there a way to verify if the update patching worked correctly?

The symptom of hanging at Loading mods... 0% is the same for any of the options that I've tried. I've pasted the final entries in the log for each option before my manual input of ctrl-c twice.

./factorio
./factorio --audio-driver ...

After the in-game update to 1.1.71 and restart the game hangs with the word mod the progress bar at 0% and 'Loading mods...'. Progress bar does not move if I wait a minute.

Switching to the linux console with alt-tab, the only thing I can do is ctrl-c twice.

I've tried renaming the mods/ directory ...