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Dear Neil, I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for my grandmother when she bought a new laptop. She managed to save about £150 compared to the equivalent laptop with Windows and MS Office preinstalled, and hopefully it should last quite a few years as well. The advantage of GNOME in that case was that the interface was simple enough for me to write an instruction manual for her. It's possibly not as nice for people used to Windows 10's GUI, but my grandmother was familiar with Android and Windows 8, so GNOME fit in well with her expectations. In terms of hardware support, everything worked except for the inbuilt Wi-Fi interface. I had to install a third party driver (which was open source, as it happens) with the dkms command to use Wi-Fi. The printer and scanner support was brilliant, and very well integrated (Geary and simple-scanner are a particularly pleasant combination). It was just as well that I chose an LTS distribution, because I haven't been able to visit her since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in more usual circumstances I would usually use Fedora - it has a less modified version of GNOME (thus easier to troubleshoot) and a more frequent update cycle. When it comes to other desktop environments, I'd really be torn between recommending Xfce on Debian and Xubuntu. Both are really nice; I think that Xubuntu's default configuration of Xfce is slightly more sensible. Best wishes, Sebastian -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq