Thanks so much. Wow those are some tricky questions lol. My only computer and main device is my dell xps 13 9310 laptop with Intel i5 evo processor and I think 8 GB of ram. Storage isn’t a concern as I never really store anything and if its important enough, I put it in the cloud. I am currently using linux mint 21.2 with cinnamon desktop.
I just installed it a few weeks ago because I was using debian 12 bookworm and was having issues with freezing and errors and WiFi problems and I could not successfully troubleshoot them (my only helped is chat gpt lol) so I wiped my drive and installed mint. I’ve been doing this same thing for a while. Swapping distros either due to boredom and curiosity or I break them to the point where idk how to fix it, so I reinstall.
I believe I have installed apps outside of official repos, sometimes successfully other times not. I try not to do that though. And the big problem is I can’t ever really tell what triggered the issues and a lot of times its hard to pinpoint WHAT is causing the issue and sometimes if I’m lucky, I can narrow it down to a certain thing, but there’s usually a ton of errors and such I find along the way. I do successfully troubleshoot and fix some things, but there’s more complex stuff that is out of my wheelhouse and I usually make things worse in my troubleshooting efforts lol