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
I like the MX series, on number 19 now.
What you want is an XFCE desktop environment, and you can get that with lots of different linux distros.
Enjoy.
I agree; Linux Mint 18.3 is solid. So is 18.1. Best OS I’ve ever run. Win 7 was the best Windoze OS.
Just takes a minute to get used to how to load different programs using GUI through “Software Manager”. Easy peasy once done though. Using the terminal is even easy using a simple cut and paste. Don’t even have to know the computer language/code.