So, what will you use after W7 support is done?

[John connor]

Use Explorer++ on Windows 7 or 8x. I've used it since Vista. It provides a very XP-esque appearance for file management.
Here it is on Windows 8.

Explorer++.jpg

That looks interesting. You might also be interested in Everything.exe by Void Tools I think it is. I turn off indexing and use Everything all the time. Very fast search ability!

[John connor]

I will be using Windows 7 as long as I can. Even then, if a browser can't run in Win 7 I may run browsing in VMware with 10. I will more than likely have to update the desktop to 10 just for gaming.

Looks like 8.1 is 2023. So I may go with that if I have to and install classic shell I think it is.

[half-moon]

My gut tells me that 2020 might be a good year to upgrade from my 2010 era laptop.

If your thinking of using a brand new laptop with Linux you might want to think again. I have been through many many Linux
forum's and one of the biggest issues for them is keeping up with new hardware. It takes them time to work out all the bugs
of open source drivers and such. Your much better to use a 5 or 8 year old Laptop. If it can handle W10 then Linux is no problem.

As for the other stuff. I think it's going to be hard for you to find a decent replacement in Linux for what your needing.
Linux is still wild west in some places. Text to speech and such is definitely in that realm.

In my experience, new hardware works just fine for Linux.

[Latitude]

Because I don't care about security of my OS, I will use Win 7 indefinitely.

Win 7 Forever.

[Robert Schwartz]

Thorazine or Risperdal.

[moon convert]

Thanks, Thehandyman1957. Based on what you said,

It takes them time to work out all the bugs
of open source drivers and such.

If I go with Linux on a new laptop, I'll definitely go with ThinkPenguin. Reading some of their material, I think the leader of that project makes sure all of his hardware is compatible with open source drivers. Also, based on this,

As for the other stuff. I think it's going to be hard for you to find a decent replacement in Linux for what your needing.

I think if I'm serious about having functional assistive tech in a Linux environment, I should probably buckle down and learn the funky gnome desktop in sonar. Not sure if it's worth the effort though. Anybody know of any good, distro agnostic forms where I can ask assistive tech questions? You guys in the palemoon forms are great, but it occurs to me, that this might not have been the best place for really specific distro feature questions.

Also, I realized I never answered the question that started this thread. If I didn't have to jump through all the assistive tech hoops, I think I'd transition to Linux mint 18 Xfce. I was doing a little bit of experimenting resurrecting an old netbook, install the new version of Xfce and it was great. Slightly less eye-catching than cinnamon, but just as easy to use and significantly lighter on resources.

[loxodont]

I've found no final decision yet, but as I already got problems with MS security updates I think I'll not wait until 2020 and switch to Mint or Xubuntu for online use and keep Win7 for offline work with all my programs which can't be replaced by Linux apps.