Don’t apologize for speaking your mind! Your experience has generally mirrored my own, as I also had a decade old computer conk out on me, causing me to swap to mint after recalling its ease of use. Booting from a drive made me feel somehow slick, and I loved it. Though I still don’t know what killed my old computer, I just bought an old business laptop without an OS and went to town.

The only thing that still trips me up is installing from repos via terminal. Visual package lists would be appreciated, but by the time I’m done, I forget to install one. I probably have a dozen packages I need to remove, at this point. Bleh