I understand the frustration. I guess I’ll just say make sure if you choose a new distro, that it specifically prevents the thing you just ran into. I’m not sure you’re going to find one. I don’t know your specific case, but I wonder if you were using some built-from-source components as well as some apt packages.

Something you may want to consider which may help prevent the situation you just ran into is to use something like ansible. This lets you write a specific configuration of how you want your system to be (probably determined after some manual setup) and let ansible figure out how to get your system to that state. Ansible is recommended because it’s free and simple to use, but it’s also a RedHat product so I’m not sure how good those claims will be in the future. But the concept of configuration-as-code is a damn good one, and one that will help you from running the same setup commands if you setup a new system or bork something about your original setup.

I’m sure more passionate people can argue the finer points of apt vs yum vs pacman vs whatever. I don’t really care too much personally because when I run into that problem, I blame myself and not the OS. I’ve cut myself enough times to know that, at least.