Other than Ubuntu, other than Mint, other than Debian, other than any other debian-based distro. It may sound extreme, but you shouldn't have had the trouble you had, which may be the particular hardware combination you have doesn't like something in the Debian family line.

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An example would be?

But would it still work if grub is messed up?

BTW I should also mention that before all this I ran the sophos antivirus and though there were no viruses there were some 200 errors which were mostly due to not being able to read certain files. In other words the antivirus was denied access to those files. Could it mean something?

Arch, CentOS, Fedora, Manjaro, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE.

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I can only suppose it is possible. I know nothing about it.

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Which would be the best for me? And are you sure I won't be facing the same problem?

fedora has a fairly newbie-friendly installer in case you get that far. i would steer clear of arch as the install is through the terminal and manjaro because pacman (its package management program) can be a bit more than a newbie might want to take on at first. i am not familiar enough with the others to weigh in on them.

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I hope I won't be facing the same problem as before. There's another thing, I managed to establish a VPN connection with a server. Will that still be intact?

unless you created the previous usb with persistence, all settings were lost when you shut your system down. at this point it seems like the goal should be creating a usb that can boot since your old one will not do so.

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Switching distros the correct way forward is to wipe the disk, IOW, a fresh start. If your existing installation included a separate filesystem for /home, then it might be able to be preserved while starting over with the rest of the disk. That could mean your VPN settings could be preserved.

I've been using Fedora and openSUSE all their existences. openSUSE has been my primary Linux for 18 years. Fedora never has been my primary. I like openSUSE's installer and most of the rest of its personality, its two package management systems in particular, much better than any other I've tried. I like Mageia a little better than Fedora, and should have included it in my list of suggestions.

The DE for most people is more important than the distro. The major players are KDE and Gnome. Most big distros offer both, and others, but the others might not be available directly from installation media, installable only by including online repos at installation time, or by adding them post-installation. Xubuntu uses the XFCE DE, which isn't available from default installation media for any of those distros that I suggested AFAIK without including online repos at installation time.

Note too that the major distros offer net install versions, which means a small partially full CD iso to download and burn to start the installation process with, and online repos used for the bulk of installation, so only what you want and need be installed. Net installs are what I use almost exclusively.

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I can always order a CD from Amazon but since it's going to take time, so is it possible to do it with a stick as well?

BTW it's pretty amazing that you guys have been giving me this valuable advice for free and for such an extended period of time. Thanks for all this from the bottom of my heart.

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I just created an installation usb for open side using etcher and yetupon trying to boot my laptop with it I am getting the same problem

Installation of/for what?

Did you ever discover your laptop brand and model?

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