I think Mint is better out of the box than it used to be. I was on it maybe 5 or 6 years ago and had to troubleshoot a few issues, but I just came back to it a few months ago and everything worked flawlessly out of the box.

I’m relatively new to Mint, but I thought that sudo apt update just checked for updates and sudo apt upgrade -y was for actually installing the updates. I don’t see why that would break it though.

In my experience Google is a bit better than DDG. I tried it out a few years ago and often found myself going back to Google for certain searches. Been using DDG again for a few weeks and having a somewhat similar experience.

In my experience, Instagram has also become the most reliable source for local restaurants randomly being closed (this has happened more often than I would like to discuss post-pandemic) and breweries (i.e. which food truck is at which brewery on any given day).

I have found those to be the only reasons that I ever check Instagram.