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?
If anyone is telling you to avoid GNOME, avoid them.
Pick GNOME and both your parents and you as tech support will enjoy life and enjoy using the computer. Wayland is pretty solid on Debian/Ubuntu, but it still is not as “easy” as X11, as X11 behaves normally like Windows for drag/cut/copy mouse operations.
Whatever you like will not necessarily work for them. So avoid pushing any of your own choices on them.
You can enable the Applications menu and put Dash To Panel extension to make things great. Also, there is nothing must have about the Start paradigm from Windows. GNOME’s workflow with the fusion of tiling and snapping windows in GNOME 45 is very close to the future of computing.