michael diemer
In regards to your post. Have you looked at Linux Lite? Looks & feels similar to Windows.
What is Linux Lite?
Wow, I didn't think this thread still had life! but thanks for the tip. I have indeed run Linux Lite, along with Zorin, Bodhi, Bunsen Labs, various versions of Ubuntu; also Manjaro, and several others. I even tried a couple BSD systems. In fact, I got so into Linux that I was doing my music on Linux Mint for a couple years. I compose classical-style music, and I was able to use almost everything I used on windows 7, and got good results. however, it came at the price of frequent crashes; updates breaking Wine; etc. It got to the point that I stopped updating mint. I then decided that if I was going to run a non-updated system, I would be better off going back to W7. So that's what I did. I keep it offline by default, and use Mint LMDE (based on Debian, not Ubuntu), for my daily driver.
In my opinion, Mint LMDE is the best Linux around, and as good as W7. You can't go wrong with it. There are very few things you can't do with it, and you can always run windows for that stuff. But I refuse to upgrade beyond W7. I have tried several times. It never lasts more than 2 or 3 days, after which I roll it back. In fact, I just bought a refurbished HP Elite 8300. I had many choices as it is such a great machine. I could have gotten W10 on it, but I chose W7 Pro instead. I have it fully updated, but still consider it as an archive, keeping it, like my music rig, offline by default. We can open all our old docs and pics on it, going back even to our W98 machine (which we still have). Ah, the good old days, when we looked forward to each new version of Windows. That ended, at least for me, with W7. It's not the same company anymore.