>>913
Weird. My mint installation has had 0 problems throughout 3 years through many updates. Did you maybe make a frankenmint with flatpaks, .deb's and whatever else? I just stick to apt.

>>913

inb4 NixOS doesn't have this problem

On Guix if an update breaks something, you can just roll-back toa previous generation, you can do this straight from the GRUB boot menu, if it doesn't boot or something.
NixOS should be similar but I'm not sure if it's all configured by default. I'm just learning Nix(ultimately just to extend Guix).
Both require some learning to use, Guix's documentation is good while Nix's is infamous.
>>914
Flatpaks shouldn't interfere with the rest of the system, that's kind of the point of them.
>>919
I wouldn't get any Mac older than an M1. You could just use those old versions of MacOS(that won't be supported for that long) on other laptops since it's x86_64.