What are the pros/cons of GNU coreutils vs BSD utils?

EDIT : from their website : Desktop environment -> GNOME. What a choice, not for me.

I can’t read anything from that website but I trust you. It’s been a while I am away from debian based distro and digging a bit : the problem is not that you need a ppa but you want the very latest version of the driver. You can have your reasons for that.

Mesa drivers are properly packaged from debian and forks alike. Going out of this way to install package from unknown people/org has its risk indeed. If newer GPU/graphics chipset would need newer driver I still make a point that this should be the manufacturer responsibility and not community to work from opaque implementation.

this is 11 years ago situation. there are still ppa requirements for Nvidia last time I checked but not for mesa.

I am not here to defend mint, never used it, but saying that a graphic driver can brick your system is spreading misinformation.

Bricking is very serious and means that your device becomes as useful as a brick. It can happen when damaging the hardware or firmware.

It seems you had a bad experience with graphic driver, this is 99% of the time the responsibility/fault of the GPU manufacturer (I guess Nvidia for you, AMD is not that friendly either). At worse you plug a bootable USB to recover your files and reinstall Linux.