Background = semi retired ex owner of a computer service centre in a medium sized UK town, mostly Windows of course, but I am a big Mint fan.
Since retiring, have been earning pocket money by turning many folk on in my local area to the joys of Linux (mostly Mint 17 Mate).
OK, I regularly get asked to put LM onto laptops and PCs that are of the "XP" era, as of course many of us do. You know, Dell Latitude D600 / Inspiron 510 & 1100 / Compaq NX series etc etc, all IDE / Pentium mobile or Centreno / 2 gig max ram (or 1gig even) that type of thing. (but old Athlon's = bin it
)I have tried many of the "lightweight" (non pae when required) Distros, LXLE / Sparky / Lubuntu / Peppermint / Legacy OS (with it's html5 browser) / etc / even the latest Puppy
They all work fine for me, but I want something that my customers (many of them are "silver surfers") find familiar (read = as close to XP as possible and LM Mate is good for that). However, even the "lightwieght" versions of LM17 don't work well on the older hardware (like listed above). All the other Distros (mentioned above) have window managers / menu systems that are too "different" or have too much geeky software bundled with them (which confuses folk and can be difficult or time consuming to remove) or have daft things that can go wrong (like remove the sys tray bar in Bodhi Linux by mistake and it's gone for good
)So, I went back a good few years and did a build of LM9, updated it as best I could, removed stuff that my customers won't need (Thunderbird, Pigin, HexChat, Transmission, Gimp, TomBoy etc etc). I ended up with a nice clean, tidy LM9 that worked just fine, even the Firefox Flash issue seems to have gone away
. I thought, OK, it might no longer be supported, but it works just fine (and on non pae too). Then a well respected regular on here advised against using LM9 in the wild due, to security issues, which is a shame 
I even thought about making my own Distro, with all the carp removed and a "normal" menu and desktop look. But then I researched it and realised this was a quite big task. I am surprised that there isn't one all ready, Lubuntu is close but gets no cigar from me (the latest version being not good on old hardware imho).
Anyone care to comment, or point me in the direction of a Distro that would be as good in respect of my requirements (outlined above)?
My only excuse for the latter is that I was hoping (against hope) that someone would come along and say "Hey, there is nothing wrong with using LM9, you just need to........."
(they work just fine with LM9)
