[CatOwner]

I had a feeling when I made this request that I would see a lot of different suggestions. I guess that's the beauty and the frustration for some with Linux.

I am going to download Mint and Xubuntu to try out both as a start. I think once I become a bit more familiar with the Linux environment, I can decide which direction I want to go.

[SanchoP]

I'm a unrepentant distro hopper for years and PCLOS is the best of the bunch. The developer's a good ol' boy from Texas.

[Openurmind]

Seriously, Please save yourself a LOT of problems and go straight to Mint cinnamon 18.3 then upgrade the kernel with the update manager. It WILL be the most stable and most like Win 7. Mint is the best but the 19.x and above is having hardware and freezing issues.

Myself and a couple others have been through all this before and it cost us a lot of time and trouble with the others. In fact I just gave the newest Ubuntu a shot and it doesn’t work with some hardware either. The Ubuntu support forum is busy busy with complaints and problems. The mint board is very very slow, and what complaints are there are about version 19.2