Damn these guys are very passionate about how shitty thunderbird is

You should probably go for Linux Mint. I love the Gnome Desktop environment, but you’d need to install it afterwards. Probably go for the XFCE version of Linux mint.

I had a similar issue a few years back and I fixed it by entering TTY2 by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 and figuring out what broke via the terminal. My issue was that xorg couldn’t start because some dependencies broke after installing an update.