Good luck with that, linux doesn’t do power saving well.
+1 for Mint, I have it on my dad’s laptop for internet browsing, the only issue I had with it was that after two years the auto-backup filled the 120GB ssd and it didn’t start up anymore. Reboot-> Recovery-> Clean-up trash and it fixed itself. Mint has a 3 options, they all look like something between Windows 98 and 7. One of them (Mate I think) didn’t boot on the laptop at all, so went with Cinnamon.
+1 for Joplin People have strong opinions on note taking apps, I use Joplin too, it’s a Markdown editor with plugins and encryption built into the app, so you can use anything for syncing, even google Drive. I personally had no issues with it, but the biggest haters say
“it leaves a great first impression until something goes wrong and you lose your files.”
So, markdown, so it’s a text editor that makes .md files, and lets you sort them in Folders/Notebooks. People expect the .md files to be stored in readable folders too. Joplin just dumps all the files and pictures into /resources and uses some database to sort them, as they have randomized names even without encryption. So if Joplin doesn’t open anymore you’re left with a “00d7da0ed41c46c28ccab746c5e8559a.crypted” mess.
I like and use Joplin, but there’s no harm in telling people to make back-ups, just in case.