For what it's worth, my brother & I set our mom up with a Slackware machine running dropline GNOME (this was years ago). It was a good thunderbird+firefox combo, very stable. I remember the uptimes past 90 days. She needed some software for work that only worked in IE, so it had to go eventually.

When it does work, it works really well. The only requirement she had was that none of her icons changed: there were several links to specific websites she wanted on the desktop (bookmarks be damned), arranged in clusters. It's no trouble at all for Gnome, with launchers, of course.