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.

I’ll take another look at it. I had a pihole setup and tried to switch it over when I moved to ATT but couldn’t find any DNS options. After some quick Googling the unanimous answer seemed to be that ATT doesn’t let you. But I’ll look into it again, I would love to get my pihole working again.

I have zero love for ATT but love my fiber plan. I’d like to switch, since they don’t let me change the DNS server, but the plan I had before was awful and my internet dropped all the time.

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.