Yes, agreed with the other comment. Did you check uptime command ? In your system info it shows Uptime : 22 mins. In a terminal you can also type uptime or w
Agreed on using Firefox/LibreWolf and uBlock Origin, I love that combination. I think the thing is that Google Chrome is much faster than Firefox on Android phones (I don’t mind, I hardly ever use mobile to browse), and long time habits can be hard to break for some people.
From past forums reading I remember that a boot loader in Linux can have trouble booting properly when you use two different physical drives (Rather than one drive and different partitions), I think it needs to specifically get to know about both drives. Does this help ?
Where my curiosity lies is this, from my understanding Linux Mint is based on underlying Ubuntu as is Pop_OS, so how come both Pop_OS and Ubuntu recognise the wi-fi card out of the box so to speak but Mint doesn’t.
Different releases of Linux distributions come with different kernel versions (e.g. 4.x vs 5.x vs 6.x). And in the past sometimes for some devices (Like Android smart phones for mtp file transfer, or security keys) additional udev rules had to be added to make the Linux system recognize the device properly. Then there is firmware (closed source binary blobs) as well.
I remember a friend having issues with the WiFi card, with an old LTS version of Ubuntu, whereas a brand new Ubuntu version worked fine with the WiFi card. Glad to hear it all works for you, and welcome on board @ Planet Linux.
Your storing in password protected zip file is better than storing it plain text in a file on your computer but the password encryption of zip is probably not that strong. A friend of mine insists on using a disk encrypted pen drive with an office document having his passwords. I hope he has a backup drive :)