I’m currently playing around with Debian on an old laptop of mine. If I can get the setup to a place where it feels sufficient for me to take my hands off, it could be the answer for this other computer.

(Thanks for DE recommendations. It does my head in trying to keep straight which ones are suited to which uses.)

I had Zorin on my own computer for a while and really liked it, but it was crashing every few days and I decided I didn’t want to put up with that. I’ll give it another try one of these days - the issue may have been resolved, or my hardware my be different by then. But I won’t use it on a computer whose user can’t do their own tech support.

98% of the time when they’ve had a problem with Windows, they just needed to restart the computer. (It has been impossible to convince them that computers need a full shutdown periodically, and Windows doesn’t cope with ‘always on’.)

When it’s something more than that, they either have to find someone closer to help or wait until we visit. Doing tech support long-distance for people who can’t adequately describe the problem is a losing game.

There were some broken package dependencies which I had to fix manually (a non-issue on my own device; a major red flag for this device). And after one set of updates, it needed about three tries to boot successfully (requiring hopping into recovery mode to smooth out the wrinkle - again, a non-issue if it were my own device, but…).

As best I can tell at the moment, it’s working fine with Mint installed. My concern is what happens next time something is updated or installed and I’m not there to resolve an issue.