I chose Debian 12 as a solid and stable base. Which of these shipped DEs is the best for this particular laptop series and Windows 10 like user experience?
GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Xfce 4.18
Don’t know the exact laptop model and year, but here are some specs: IdeaPad, only HDD, DVD drive, shipped with Win 8 or 10 (I think), unbearably slow on Win 10 currently
Use case: office, web, movies (not streaming), things for non-tech-savvy users
Personally, I’m using Arch btw with KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland, so I would prefer this over other DEs, but Debian still ships version 5. Has anyone experience with performance on an old Lenovo laptop with any of the listed environments?
Cinnamon. Whenever I try something different I always come back. Stable, reliable, similar to Windows, but without all the unnecessary improvements.
Agreed. Putting plasma on your parents PC seems like a recipe to get calls like “I’ve moved my taskbar and I don’t know how to put it back!”
Cinnamon just gives you a simple, easy to understand Windows UX, with far less room to go wrong.