I’d suggest something like Linux Mint for someone switching over - but rather than me make assumptions about what she’s used before, I usually recommend librehunt.org as a nice starting point to help choose.

A decade ago, when my moms laptop stopped working, I installed Fedora on it and set everything up for her, and she loved using it for years until my dad got her a mac 🙄

Now her mac is deprecated and I’m sure that fedora laptop still works just fine lol

“Linux, this is Mom, shes looking to adopt you so you be nice Okay?” “Mom, this is Linux”

People need to experience something before they can ascertain if it is a viable option. Install Ubuntu or Linux Mint on a secondary device, let her see how familiar it is to her.

Then you can explain some of the other advantages of using Linux.

Install ElementaryOS on an old laptop, and let her use it.

She runs a business, so sell the ‘free, but used by lots of people’ standpoint, hard.

My mom has a business and mostly uses Windows and Mac OS X

Do all her applications run on Linux? If not, please don’t switch. She makes money with that. Money > ideology if you can’t afford losing it ;)

I think you should pick a good desktop OS like Linux Mint, and install it and just put it in front of her.

I would avoid complex presentations about what Linux is and stuff like that because that can introduce all kinds of nuances that aren’t strictly necessary to know, which can scare people away.

install it everywhere and say it’s Windows 12 Update

My grandmother was completely happy with elementary because more user friendly and she just need a browser and office apps

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• Check ElementaryOS or Manjaro. They are typically beginner friendly and well documented and their full versions coming with good preinstalled packages.
• Show here the benefits and explain the benefits of FOSS to her. I would not only pull the money argument, also the security and usability factor should play a role.
• Show here examples.
• Find weak spots, aka problematic software and show here alternatives which run on every OS e.g. Jami over MS Teams and so on. Help here pre-install necessarily programs.
• Run a test for a month before you come to a final conclusion.

Is she using anything besides a web browser?

She can test out different distros in her browser on https://distrotest.net/index.php

Really though, if she’s just gonna use it for text processing, web browsing and emailing it’s more about the DE than the distro.

Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Elementary, Fedora… should all be good choices.

I think it’s most important to teach her about the differences, no more exes, but instead repo, debs, appimages, flatpaks, and stuff like that. Watching those recent Linus videos might give you good insight in what differences might confuse her.

Well, first of all, is it worthy? If she uses photoshop and stuff like that, maybe she just can’t switch. If she uses excel, it’s only getting used to libreoffice. If she uses stuff on browsers, well she can switch easily. If she’s in the second or third category, just say this things: free, open source, fuck microsoft/apple/google, no viruses, it can run even on toaster, I always used it and never had problems (don’t laugh while saying this), r/unixporn, active community and more stuff that I can’t think of rn. If you’re lucky at this point she’ll want to switch and then just guide her in the distro choose.

I recommend Trisquel. Use plasma DE for sure, it provides amazing user experience. Tell her to not expect things exactly like those of Windows or Mac and learn till she becomes comfortable. Initially she’ll struggle, later she won’t even think of using Windows or Mac.