So I've dabbled with trying out Linux over the past 10ish years, but this past year I've been trying to commit to the transition away from Windows entirely due to the sunsetting of Win10. The computers I own are fairly old (newest one being a laptop from 2018), since money has been very tight for a while, so I figured they would get some revitalization from using an OS that wasn't so bloated. However, the 2 old PCs and 1 Chromebook I installed Linux Mint onto all had their PSUs fail within the span of a month, which is making me paranoid.

Both PCs were really old (2013) and were what I had for basic steam gaming until I got a Steam Deck last year, but I put Mint v21 Xfce on them for basic web browsing and programming (v22 had too many issues with the old Nvidia graphics card). The Chromebook was from around 2015 and I gave it to my parents to use since all they needed was something to browse the web and check their finances. I put Mint Cinnamon v22.1 on it just a couple months back. Mint seemed to run really well on all 3 computers for several months, they weren't overused/overclocked, and weren't kept on or in hibernation for more than a day. Then without warning, one by one they all just refused to boot up entirely. Pressing the power buttons does nothing, not even a brief flicker of life.

Does anyone else have experience with this kind of thing happening to them? I'm not looking for a fix to these computers since I'm pretty sure they're all completely dead, but all of this happening in such a short timeframe feels like it's not just a coincidence. Is this a common problem with Mint that I just didn't see when looking for a distro to use on old hardware? Honestly just baffled.

I still have one laptop left that's running win10 that I'd like to get transferred over to some version of Linux soon, but this experience has made me very hesitant. I really need this laptop readily available for studying and job hunting, but I'm quite aware of the security risks the longer I use win10.

Sorry if this isn't the right place for this question but I couldn't think of anywhere better to put it.

So I finished my degree in computer science a couple years ago right when the tech crash just started hitting, and the job market has been an enormous clusterfuck. Instead of trying to get a job where everyone seems to be going all-in on LLMs, machine learning, and crypto bullshit, I'd really like to be able to put my programming skills to good use helping out scientific research in some way, but I have no clue where to start. While in college I did help out my university's biology research department by writing small programs here and there to help undergrad/grad students who weren't very knowledgeable about technical solutions, but because of the recent funding cuts to scientific research and education, everyone there is struggling harder than I am.

Ideally I'd love to help contribute to causes that help improve people's lives (or astronomy just because space is cool). Does anyone know of resources I could look into to start down this path?

I have an upcoming interview for a position developing iOS apps using SwiftUI, but I don't have experience programming for SwiftUI (my prior experience was in ReactNative) and don't own any Apple devices so I can't use Xcode to practice. I have tried setting up Oracle VirtualBox on my PC with Windows10 to run Mac OS v12.01 Monterey (64-bit) several times with different settings, but every time I start it up, it gets stuck on the following lines:

• ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin::start - waitForService(resourceMatching(AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement) timed out
• ApplePC::notifyPlatformASPM - registering with plugin with ASPM Support false
• AppleKeyStore: 7492:109: unexpected session: 100000 uid: -1 requested by: 109
• AppleKeyStore: 11150:109: operation failed (sel: 7 ret: e00002c2, -1, 100000)
• IOConsoleUsers: time(0) 0->0, lin 0, lik 1,
• IOConsoleUsers: gIOScreenLockState 3, hs 0, bs 0, now 0, sm 0x0

I admittedly don't have much experience with VirtualBox or MacOS, and any time I've tried to search for these specific messages I come up empty. Is there any way of getting this virtual mac running to the point where I can start using Xcode, or am I just out of luck?