LogarithmicCamel
It seems to me that installing external audio drivers and changing Pulseaudio configurations is messing with the OS. Mint uses fairly old, stable packages. Newer distros have Pipewire for audio now. It's a Pulseaudio replacement and might be useful in your case. Have you tried a newer distro? You can try Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora from a USB stick to see if your audio equipment works out of the box. Then you won't have to fiddle so much with the OS. Fedora Silverblue in particular is immutable and you can reset the OS to any current or previous state with one command, even without Timeshift. Another thing for testing software like DaVinci Resolve is Distrobox containers. You can change whatever you want inside a container and try different distros but you won't break the underlying OS. Hacker's dream.
Even distros like Mint are buggy and requires multiple restart every day.
There is something wrong with your installation. Other people just restart to update the kernel often once a week/month. So you might as well tell us what's making you restart Mint so often.
Raw cashews are poisonous though, at least to humans. Maybe those crows were far smarter than you think.
I can't believe no one mentioned this yet. I hope OP reads this comment. The first step is to make sure this new computer you want to buy is compatible with Linux. Otherwise your experience will be very frustrating, no matter what distro you choose. That is, if you can install any distros at all. Ask the vendor if this machine is compatible with Linux.
According to what I have heard, other elite hacker skills that are at risk of getting lost in the younger generations include searching on Google and using e-mail.
Not sure about this. When I installed Firefox, it asked me if I allowed it to collect data and run studies (I answered yes). Also, as far as I remember, I never changed the Marketing Data setting and it was off.