Astro_Will

Dave, it will run MATE no problem. My ACER REVO R3610 was made in 2009 and it has significantly less specs than your laptop. On Ubuntu Mate, repositories (think of them as a bank for software) as straight-forward for installation/updates.

This guide in the link works well for just about any PC. The author wrote it for Raspberry Pi 3 but i managed to follow it and installed a working system on an old ACER REVO R3610. http://www.astrofriend.eu/astronomy/projects/project-kstars-indi-linux/project-kstars-indi-linux.html There is a pdf as well (attached) with all these steps. INDI/EKOS/KSTARS is soo much fun, with a basic ACER REVO R3610, i managed to run three DSLRs in a triple setup. I could do the same with APT on windows but it KSTARS has acquisition+plate-solving+guiding all in one program. Can you imagine what an automated observatory can do with three scope running simultaneously? That's my end goal!!! Jasem and all the devs on INDI-forums are absolutely helpful, so much so that my routine when i wake up first thing is check updates/posts on the forums because it's very active. Above all, it is open-source. It's far from perfect but I can't think of any community that is powered by Astro-enthusiasts and the general direction that INDI/EKOS/KSTARS will take will be large determined by the community. So why not join in? :-) Pi3setup4Dec16-2.pdf