The Joy of being on the bleeding edge

[plg6]

> if you have a wifi dongle it may still work.?

I don't, but i see where I can get one from Amazon.com tomorrow on prime so that will be easily fixed. For around $10, not bad. BTW the cost for this "beast" was just a bit under $1,400 US.

[Teddy]

Since the machine is really new, stick with distros that have newer kernels. That will give you the drivers needed to operate the hardware on your motherboard. The Linux Lite 2.x series is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which is now almost 2 years old. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will come out sometime by mid or late April 2016. The kernels on the LTS releases do not change much at all, though Ubuntu adds more hardware support twice every year after the original release date, until the next LTS release [or so they claim].

[plg6]

Thanks again for all the replies. At the end of the day the solution was right in front of me. I spent the last few days since my original posting trying assorted distros running the gamut from Manjaro to Fedora, Debian, and a bunch of others along the way. I've been using vmware player for years for those few programs I need to run Windows for (tax return software, mainly). Some would not run, some would not be able to install the vmware kernel pieces, some would barf on something else. Most took issue with the nouveau driver for the video card, either not coming up at all, or only running it in 1024 * 768. 

Then I realized that the Ubuntu 15.10 that the vendor had installed on the 2nd hard disk had been working perfectly. So I put it on the primary HD, turned of Unity and turned on xfce and now everything is going. So, here I've got two versions of Ubuntu going, one on each hard disk, but then, if one craps out on me I can still boot the other. Insurance. Loaded the native Nvidia driver for the card so the system is cooking with gas. I'll miss Linux Lite and I wish you all the best, but I'm finally happy to get a stable, working system.