I looked into ready made NAS machines but wasn’t sold on the software that came with them. Ended up building a small PC and installing OpenMediaVault on it which I have been super happy with.

Depending on how many HDD bays you need you can just buy a refurbished office Dell or HP and it’ll do the job more than adequately.

That is 2 words (or 3 depending how you count the abbreviation). You’d think a dictionary could get that right.

Aye, Cinnamon i’d say is pretty Windows like now (taskbar, start menu and tray) but definitely not as good as KDE. The average user would be happy with either I think.

If you didn’t know, Ubuntu is based on Debian.

Mint has the Cinnamon desktop environment which isn’t that different from Windows/KDE. You’re probably thinking of Gnome?