See I just like LMDE. Everything works without fiddling (I want my OS to be boring). And if I feel spicy - backports.

I’m a senior IT type. My work laptop is Debian.

We like good pastries, coffee, good booze and feeling appreciated. Go make friends with the senior IT types and the help desk manager. Trust me it’s with it.

Also…

1. everything is changeable. But not everything should be changed.
2. There will come a time when you need to interact with the command line. This is expected, and no you did not do something wrong.
3. Have fun.

Oh if your looking for a distro? Mint is a great entry point (and even can support crusty old graybeards as well).

Good that it’s working (kinda).

So it sounds like your DNS resolver is botched. Id dig into the doc on how systemd-resolverd should look and see if you can’t rectify what went wrong (the arch wiki should have examples of what a default config looks like).

I don’t remember if arch uses cloud init configs but it being reset at boot feels like a cloud init config problem.

Let us know the following

If ping works for: localhost, your gateway, 1.1.1.1, google.com.

The contents of your /etc/resolve.conf

If you have a tun0 interface (ifconfig or ip a)

You said you uninstalled tailscale. Are there any running process or active systemd units laying around?