I don’t really understand all of the sentences above 
Feels, I caused some flame-war, which was not my intention at all.
Just in defend for my much liked Debian…
If you looked at it more thoroughly, you would have found, that Debian by default omits everything that’s closed source, and the list includes firmwares too.
https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware
However, nobody trying/using Debian is forced to use only FOSS stuff.
I myself do use proprietary dirvers for my nvidia, non-free firmwares for my intel wifi too.
So that should not be a problem.
Without actually knowing your wifi dongle, I think you neded only the firmware-realtek package.
This package is preinstalled in the “unofficial images”, you could take them for example from here:
These include the non-free blobs, and are also live system, so putting them on an USB stick makes it possible to try without actually install.
I don’t think that Debian is that stupid.
Maybe it’s not for you, that’s fine. But please don’t call it stupid!
My father (73) uses Mint too, and he is quite satisfied with it.
It looks exactly you want it to look. 
I use Debian with the MATE desktop, and I can setup MATE to look and behave as I used to it before.
See in the “post your desktop” topic, there’s my desktop:
Somewhat above in this topic you can see how it looks on my laptop too.