Is the advice in this thread getting better or worse? It's getting really hard to tell...

I can just imagine a complete noobie coming across this thread thinking "who in the hell do I believe here?? I should install Arch Linux or Gentoo instead of Ubuntu or Linux Mint???!". What poor sods they're going to be...

Perhaps I should see if my local vet is willing to do that brain surgery I might need after reading this thread

I feel dumber for reading this thread now...

Come on now, a little humor here and there is good for everyone. This world is getting too serious.

The sarcasm here has not been helpful. Not everyone recognizes the difference between it and "a little humor", or even facts.

I didn't put any sarcasm into my posts. However, everything is interpreted by readers mind, sarcasm may creep in there.

Edit: Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

I have been told only "those who think" can grasp the real meaning of this ancient oriental saying.

I use Linux Mint Cinnamon all the time and I don't have a problems it's very stable!!!

There are some cutting edge distributions that I have seen break on an update. Not many, and not often, but it happens. I remember when Ubuntu broke on an update (udev update, everything changed in device land) but that is rare.

If you want rock solid stable, the answers are RHEL and install only from the RHN. (I once was able to say CentOS, but no more). Debian, stable, and only install from the Debian repos. There are others that are normally solid, but have rare occasional borks like Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary, Q4OS, Manjaro and a few others as long as you only use the DISTRO repos. I would be happy to recommend any of them: depending upon the use case of the user of course. I understand that SUSE can be that solid, but I have not run SUSE for ever six years.

As soon as you are updating past a major version number, install form source, or install from an alien repository, you are off into non-support land. Likewise, if you use something MADE to ride the cutting edge, expect some bleeding. Distributions I love that are known to have the occasional need for bandaging include Fedora, Sparky Linux, VSIDO, among others. These are worth the pain, if you need the very latest software or enjoy the adventure.

Another whole CLASS of distributions are those that are made to launch from floppy, usb drive, CD/DVD, or a Frugal install. These are LiveCD (or USB, or DVD) images that are made to run form memory and are somewhat READ-ONLY on media. Examples are Puppy, TinyCore, DSL (DamnSmallLinux:frozen and seriously dated, but still useful): all basically children of the KNOPPIX project in one way or another, but based upon more mainline distributions or unique code bases. These are the BEST fun, because you cannot really break them. If it breaks, reboot and reload that one and you are back in action.

EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE AND CLASS I have mentioned here can be run in a virtual machine ala VirtualBox, VMWARE, KVM/QEMU with libvirt, Xen, OpenVZ, or other hypervisors or kernel based container systems. Most can be run from a E2B or Ventoy drive BEFORE you do any kind of install on 64-bit X86_64 machines.

So, what are the "gotcha" factors in trying a few?

#1 bad or incompatible hardware. Running a 64-bit kernel on a 32-bit architecture is just never going to go well. Trying an AARCH64 on Intell is going to fail like crazy. Read about the requirements and know your hardware. If your motherboard is failing, Linux cannot magic it into working. (Though, A live-cd image MIGHT work just fine even if your main drive is failing or GONE!)

#2 locked or cross mode settings on the firmware. Something made for traditional dos/MBR partitions cannot handle the newer GPT tables, and some made for GPT dropped the support for MBR. This can be a real pain, but again is mentioned in the requirements for the distributions.

#3 confusing or broken install systems. This has gotten VERY rare, but I do see it form time to time. It generally only affects a new version release until the maintainer figures out what went wrong and either rolls back to what worked or fixes the issue. Documentation that is just bad: again, very rare these days, but make sure that you attend to the documentation that is current and supported by the maintainer. (That does not mean ignore all other documentation, but understand that it is the maintainers documents that are more definitive and "official".

#4 user error. Face it, we are not ALL system admins with decades of experience. Or even POWER users. And even the ones who are put their foot in it once in a while. Usually the defaults on install for major distributions fit the most common cases, but you might do better if you really understand what you are doing. You might also make something that breaks like an overcooked cookie at the first keystroke. Once you learn not to panic and just fix the problem these make some of the very BEST stories to tell later! Not always in the moment. Grab a cup of coffee (or tea, whatever) try to figure out what happened, why it broke, and how to avoid that particular issue next time. You just invented a new learning curve of your very own: be proud.

If you just pick a good distribution, one that fits your hardware, your settings, your environment, your use case, and that has solid defaults that let you just do the install in the most simple way you can, you can bypass all of those "issues and questions" and have a well running system quickly and painlessly. Trust me on this, it feels good!

Linux did not start this thing to make people crazy. Lots of people work on making these things work because it is fun, and you can do neat and powerful stuff! And HELP people! That also feels good. And that is why we come here.

And sometimes, just sometimes, we run into someone with a problem that reminds us of some of the things we learned early to NEVER EVER DO!

I cannot tell from your descriptions, but I suspect you ran into one of THOSE things. I suggest you start over, document exactly what you plan to do before each step, and bring the full story up to the time things go south for you. Once we know what you REALLY did, we may be able to show you the "smoking gun" that is hidden in your story. And, with luck, tell you how to avoid that particular "gotcha".

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I've installed Parrot linux now and it works much better! so far anyway

Oh dear!
Wikipedia says:- Penetration testing is where you try to break into other peoples systems - with/without their permission.

Parrot is presumably for experts and not designed for your average user.
More commonly, people who don't know Linux seem to load Kali - another penetration distro.

Mint without any PPA's or junk like "flatpak" is strongly recommended.

1 members found this post helpful.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with a superset of tools and environment.
This can cause troubles with PPA's since the detection will find the version for Linux Mint, eg Ulyssa and fail.
You can make them work by finding the Ubuntu version Linux mint is based on.
One of my gripes with Linux Mint I find it difficult to find this information every time I need it.
You can find it here:
https://linuxmint.com/rel_ulyssa_cinnamon_whatsnew.php
This just shows Ubuntu 20.04, so what's the name for that?
After more investigation it shows Focal Fossa, so finally you can figure out what PPA you should be using.

Aside that, Linux Mint spends a lot of effort to prevent issues. Every upgrade instruction encourages use of timeshift prior to upgrade, discourages upgrades unless there's a compelling reason, its own upgrade manager, basing on LTS versions of Ubuntu.
Been using Linux Mint since 14, and it's absolutely come a long way since them in stability. I actually successfully upgraded from 14 to I think 19-20 with only a single breaking issue with logging in.

However, PPA's and unknown other changes can certainly decrease the stability.

2 members found this post helpful.

There is always the Debian edition of Mint - LMDE, which is functionally almost identical but is based on Debian Stable and with absolutely no Ubuntu stuff in it.

It's a big mistake to use PPA's - except as a last resort - because you are guaranteeing that your system is different to almost every other system.

You can find latest info about Mint or LMDE at https://blog.linuxmint.com/?cat=1

1 members found this post helpful.

As a bonus, you seldom need software that is not in the Debian repos. Debian has the largest repos package content of any distribution in the world, even those that are older. (And Debian is OLD!) If what you are thinking of is not there, something else with the same functionality almost certainly is there.

LMDE works dandy

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There IS a place for flatpack. If you write things so broken that when they update they break the distribution or install, use a flatpack so that it can be discarded or rolled back almost instantly.

So I could use a flatpak so that when it breaks, I can roll back to an old version?
You could say the same about software that I'd downloaded & compiled myself.

When installing flatpaks, I suppose I am meant to use a web search to download binary code from some untrusted website?
Just like downloading a program installer on Windows...