@lemmylemonade Just read, I am sorry for your wiped drive. The only solution I could think of is having a copy of your drive somewhere else. However I understand that just dropping money on a spare drive isn't always a practical solution.
@elucubra linux mint was my goldilocks for a while. Had to get through some major driver issues before it was stable but I loved it. Very recently moved to fedora because I wanted the latest updates without being on a edge distro