Without wanting to discredit your experience, I am surprised any of this is a problem. I switched to Mint around 3 years ago, and I never looked back. It was a

Without wanting to discredit your experience, I am surprised any of this is a problem. I switched to Mint around 3 years ago, and I never looked back. It was a surprisingly smooth sailing, everything worked out of the box. Nothing needed any hacks (including having an external monitor without any scaling issues, audio and video working out of the box, mouse and keyboard functining properly, etc and so forth). I had no anxiety picking distros or desktop environments, just stuck with Cinnamon and I love it ever since. What I can say, ia that my computer works as well, or maybe even better than when I did a fresh install 3 years ago. Unlike my experience with Windows where yearly fresh installs were a thing, as the computer would feel slow and sluggish over time, as if Windows deteriorated with every passing day. The only thing I needed to hack a little with on Linux was the fingerprint sensor thing. I could make it work, but it was unreliable, so I ended up disabling it. A very small price to pay.