The bank holiday Monday weather was poor and discouraged us from making the effort to go out anywhere. There wasn't much of interest on telly, so I whiled away the time downloading and trying out different distributions of Linux on the little Acer machine Kath returned to me - Ubuntu, Fedora Manjaro and Mint XFCE. All worked well, but the first two were not as lively as the latter two, as the notebook has only 2GB of RAM which isn't quite enough given demands they make on memory.
I occupied myself with this, having discovered that the trackpad wasn't recognised when I made the first install of Mint with the Mate desktop. I thought it might be an operating system deficiency, but as the fault is reproduced on each of the distros, I can only conclude it's a hardware fault. I may have knocked the machine stowing in the boot for the journey home, as up until then with WIndows 10 on it, there was no problem. Not that it matters much, as I habitually use a mouse with portable PCs.
In the end, I settled for Mint XFCE for the simple reason that there's a minimal amount to learn. I've been using Mint now for several years, with Mate, Cinnamon and even KDE versions on time. This will do all that I need it to without getting in the way. I wish I had introduced my sister to Mint many years ago. Once she'd got used to the differences with Windows, it would have given her far more confidence and control, and in turn spared me from trying to explain to her so many irrelevant things which distract Windows users from getting the job done.
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