Yeah this sounds like a disk/ssd hardware problem to me. Possibly only one part of the disk is bad and giving inconsistent results.

The key enrollment that Mint did sounds like registering the Machine Owner Key (MOK). That basically tells the bios that anything signed with that key should be permitted. The MOK is especially required when compiling your own drivers. Anything shipped by a Linux distro should already be signed so that the shim will permit it. SecureBoot is more about making sure your boot files haven’t been tampered with rather than being about preventing the owner from doing something.

You should already be able to boot any modern Linux OS that has support for SecureBoot. Only if you compile your own drivers or kernel would you need to use a MOK. If you do need that, you should be able to enroll another MOK or copy the MOK key files from the Mint install and use those keys to sign drivers in any other Linux distro.

The cli program mokutil will let you view and export your enrolled MOKs.

Use brew to update the core Unix utils such as bash, tar, sed, etc to the latest GNU releases. The mac has really outdated BSD-based versions.

I recommend The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll as a good start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)

It sounds like the SSL/TLS version or allowed cipher list are configured for higher security on your machine or browser and the sites that are failing are using a lower security config. I’m not sure where that config is on Arch. Try a different browser. Also try fetching the sites with curl just to see if that works. Curl’s verbose mode will also tell you what ciphers it tried.

curl -v https://example.com/

A quick fix might be to disable any ipv6 addresses if you don’t specifically need them. The vpn /could/ be ipv4 only, which /could/ leave your ipv6 free to leak or make ipv6 dns requests.

Agreed. Theoretically possible, but practically not possible unless you are an embedded hardware engineer with access to Sony’s datasheets and potentially crypto keys. Some sort of external box is much more practical.

assfish are soft and flabby