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.
ideally, os should not affect power supply. there is a potential that your os (well not os, but os having poor drivers causing hardware) drawing a lot of power, or possibly your system is unstable (in sense of frequently fluctuating power draw). If you think the os is to blame, find some stable taxxing benchmark (lets say ffmpeg transcode and run something for hours take a video, and then take some taxxing codec like av1 and write to /dev/null (so storage is not filled)). if the performance is stable (for ffmpeg transcode, it shows a speed parameter) and your power supply is not die-ing (i have at this moment forgotten how to spell present continous of die), then your power supply is fine, and your memory is fine too (another thing that shows abrupt behaviour). if performance is fluctuating or severely throttling, or something exotic, then maybe your setup has something broken. now swap some hardware or os, and replicate. you will likely find the problem.
Interesting, and ty for the troubleshooting tips. I'll definitely keep this in mind as something to monitor when transitioning over the os on my laptop