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.
I guess I could be jumping to conclusions with the laptop, but I did a test with the PCs and I'm pretty sure it's the PSU. Both PCs are identical because my friend and I used the same list of parts to build them over a decade ago. Mine died a little bit after installing Mint, and since my friend has a more recent build, he let me salvage his PC for parts. First thing I did was see what happens if I just put his PSU in my dead PC and it immediately booted back up. However, I was concerned that maybe some other bit of hardware in my PC caused the PSU to fail, so I just put my hard drive and the working PSU back into my friend's PC and used it as normal. About a month after that, it died the same way.
As for the other things you've suggested, I did try all of those tests to no avail, as well as cleaning/dusting all of the internals and connection ports with compressed air. I got nothing, which is why I figured I'd ask here.