Years and years ago, I used Mint on an underpowered notebook and it worked well, but Mint kind of got bloated and I wasn’t a huge fan of it at the end.

I played around with a couple of other distros that I can’t remember at the moment on other older PCs. I think I just googled ‘good linux distro for old pcs’ and (whatever) they were did the trick for my kids.

I have no experience with Fedora, as far as I can tell mostly tech enthusiasts use it. I wouldn’t install a rolling distro on a newbie’s machine, though.

1. O365 usually works fine for the online portion on most browsers, so that should be okay for their use. And won’t require them to change habits in terms of how to use the software. (Bonus: cloud storage of their documents.) Only downside is they’ll likely need an active internet connection to do anything
2. This one is tricky. I’ve had mixed experience getting newer Adobe products running in Wine, but it’s been awhile for me so I’d say try it yourself. There are probably a bunch of good FOSS/cloud options available nowadays too if annotating, commenting, etc that maybe others can elaborate more on
3. Easy peasy, Brave does work well and should help them avoid malware on “those websites”

I’d say any LTS release you can get a working setup of Adobe in should be fine for them. 90% of what they’re going to do is probably via a browser so it’s OS-agnostic. I’m fond of Debian since it’s very stable, but it comes with the drawback of older packages as time goes on, though you can pull in repos for more recent stuff for most important things.

I’m pretty sure you can’t run the offline MS office on a Linux computer, even with the recent breakthroughs in the wine/proton area.

While the online in-browser 365 worked fine for me, I’ve found it quite limited. LibreOffice has some compatibility issues documents going back and forth between it and Ms Office.

I usually don’t use any “* Office”, but when I must, one software that works quite well for me is OnlyOffice

Not likely you’ll get anything adobe or microsoft running at all well. If those two things are absolutely essential, then maybe your friend should stick to windows. If alternatives are okay, OnlyOffice has very good ms office compatibility. On the adobe side… There’s really nothing with the same kind of feature set.

From those requirements especially MS Office & Adobe they should stay on window.

If its as old as a t400 they will struggle with modern browsers & high modern web 3 websites full of JS frameworks which might cause problems with o365

The pdf requirements mean your gonna have to do a lot of configuration & program selection especially for annotation

@soupuos What rough edges?

Some hardware and proprietary software are designed maliciously with sharp blades to cut the user, but that’s nothing to do with Trisquel.

It would be good if people were to be turned off from the proprietary software kernel known as Linux and got to know GNU Linux-libre and/or Hurd instead.

@sallyNULL @piezoelectron Depends really.

I found Trisquel works fine with even a card as new as the gtx 970 thanks to Nouveau, although the card is stuck at idle clocks as the fans refuse to spin without proprietary software that is cryptographically signed to prevent its replacement.

Even newer AMD ones should work with a native resolution, but you won’t get 3D acceleration nor suspend.

Integrated Intel still works just fine.

Depends on how old it is. T420 should be able to handle at least Zorin (especially the lite variant). I’m not sure about Pop’s system requirements, I’ve only ran it in a virtual machine.