[qqii]

Since you enjoy tinkering with linux have you considered trying Fedora Silverblue/NixOS/Guix or the like? It's quite a steep learning curve but almost guarentees that you're never left in a bad state of configuration.

I'm of a similar mindset and in my period of using Windows as a daily driver I concluded that neither Windows or Linux was that much more unstable but it is my tinkering that causes 99% of my own problems.

[noisy_boy]

I did explore installing Fedora but found its installer confusing compared to Ubuntu's installer so ended up just using Pop!_OS (which is based on Ubuntu so uses the same installer).