I chose Debian 12 as a solid and stable base. Which of these shipped DEs is the best for this particular laptop series and Windows 10 like user experience?
GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Xfce 4.18
Don’t know the exact laptop model and year, but here are some specs: IdeaPad, only HDD, DVD drive, shipped with Win 8 or 10 (I think), unbearably slow on Win 10 currently
Use case: office, web, movies (not streaming), things for non-tech-savvy users
Personally, I’m using Arch btw with KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland, so I would prefer this over other DEs, but Debian still ships version 5. Has anyone experience with performance on an old Lenovo laptop with any of the listed environments?
You are simply wrong about Debian. You can say that old packages are annoying sometimes, that is fair, but they aren’t any buggier than other distros. Debian updates include security patches and bugfixes, just not feature updates.