Why? I'm running Mint Xfce for many years on many machines and always have all (automated) updates enabled and there never ever were any issues. Theoretically, it might happen that keeping an install continuously updated could break the system but that never happened so far, neither to me nor to other users in my circles.
Yep. IME, Mint Xfce runs fine on older hardware like 10...15 years old where any modern Windows would just choke.
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I wouldn't sweat it. In my opinion the desktop environment is more important than the distro. I'm partial to KDE Plasma and Cinnamon, but desktop environment choice is more about personal preference than anything else now days. Some may use slightly less RAM, but I have tested many of them and did not see a difference in responsiveness, even on the computer I built 18 years ago. Sure, it's measureable, but I'm not confident it really is noticable - kind of analogous to comparing a SINAD of 120dB to a SINAD of 100dB.
There's a reason why this famously happened back in 2012:
While you've still got Windows, give LibreOffice a try and see how you get on moving files back and forward between it and Office. In my experience it's pretty good but not perfect, and for some features it can go very wrong - but they may not be features you care about. If it's not good enough you could subscribe to the web version of Office. Given that even MS can't get opening some old Office docs right in more recent versions of Office than it was saved in, I'm willing to cut LibreOffice some slack - occasionally it does a better job than MS!
