Hardware: AMD A6-6400k in an MSI FM2-A75MA-E35

I came back to linux after taking a few years off. I first installed Ubuntu with unity and, after it updated a few hours after install, when I booted into the desktop, all I could see was the background. If I clicked on icons or areas with something clickable, a transparent box would come up and it was obviously not very useable. I had the Catalyst 13.10 beta drivers installed, because that's the only one that supports my processor. If I could do it over, I would probably not buy anything AMD, but I'm in too deep now.

So I googled around looking for solutions, and all I could really find were people saying it happened to them but no solutions. I wasn't pleased with unity anyway, so I switched to Ubuntu Gnome. I avoided updating for a few days and got things perfect and was all set up and going great, then I updated trying to get Ubuntu to push sound through HDMI, and it happened again in Gnome. I managed to boot ctrl-alt-f1 into the command line and deleted the AMD drivers, but I had to --force the uninstall because it said "files had been changed." This at least let me get back in to save my data, but after booting into it once, the computer is completely dead.

I did attempt to jump ship, but the fedora live cd wont boot. I'm assuming this is a video driver issue, again. I don't really want to use Fedora because I don't have time to spend all day tweaking it, and it'll inevitably break on me again.

So I'm about to install Ubuntu Gnome again. Is there something I can do to keep this from happening everytime ubuntu updates? Is there an open source alternative to catalyst? Would it be better to just use Debian with Gnome? Any help would be appreciated.