I’d recommend Linux Mint honestly. It’s popular enough that they can find solutions to common problems, has a Windows-like interface, and it mostly “just works” on common hardware. Printer drivers, networking, and audio all worked out of the box for me. Cinnamon is lightweight but powerful, and the Mint theme looks really good on it. The default package repos have everything you’re likely to need, and the software manager tool is easy to use.

I installed Linux Mint on my Mom’s and Grandma’s PCs as it’s one I use for most of mine. They took to it like a duck to water.

My Mom has a little bit of growing into it as she plays a lot of videogames (literally more than I do lol) but it’s been smooth sailing.

My Grandma primarily does stuff in her browser so for her it was more of a new skin for her PC.

My Mom is running a system with a R5 1600 and a RX 580 and my Grandma is running a Intel Broadwell CPU (I can’t remember which kind with integrated graphics.

To get my Grandma into Linux required some prep before hand teaching her about doing all of her office stuff in her browser because she was rude or die on Microsoft Office. Now she’s ride or die for Google’s office suite (not perfect but primarily painless for me).

For my Mom it was pretty simple after she started getting pop-ups to upgrade to Windows 11 and then being told her system doesn’t support it. Also her finding out that Windows 10 was going EoL in 2025 really helped.

Linux Mint. She opens Firefox to check her emails and work panel. Only complaint is that it is my old giant laptop that I let her have. I will give her a different one soon.

I put Pop_Os! on my mums MacBook and stopped having to do remote support almost entirely.

The PC i gave my dad on birthday to replace his 10-year cheapo Medion pc with random bluescreens on boot.

Had initially a bit of trouble to get his work software running in wine, with integrated TeamViewer for support and all. But since then it’s smooth sailing, he thought it was the new Windows for the first two years (Materia theme on XFCE).

Motivation was that Debian stable and unattended upgrades with occasional support for linux-vs-Windows things is less trouble (for me) than fighting an OS working against you long-term.

He did manage to have xfce-panels disappear once though.

Remote support via rustdesk.

Firstly, don’t go out of your way to try and convince or force people, but TL;DR – if you have an opportunity and want to give someone a solid start, my recommendation is always Linux Mint.

My mother asked me to switch her in September 2022. Some bad Windows Defender definitions update started triggering warnings every 5 minutes starting at 2AM or something riduculous. I got a frantic call to come over because of “someone hacking her computer” fully expecting to just fix whatever was busted and move on with my day.

After a conversation, I installed LMDE for her and set up automatic updates plus Timeshift. She has had exactly two problems since then:

• she forgets that the scanner isn’t accessed by right-clicking the printer’s tray icon and messing with settings

• she didn’t like that she can’t move desktop icons to wherever she wants

She was also just about the easiest switch there could have been. Like many older folks, her primary use for her desktop is web/email and she has already been using Firefox/Thunderbird since the '00s.

Ubuntu on my nanny’s PC. Windows was choking its 4GB of ram and now it boots in 3min instead of 15min. She is super happy with it because you can actually do stuff on it.

Anyway, made the mistake of choosing Ubuntu because I knew the installer offered a minimal Gnome installation (yes minimal Gnome XD) For the future I’ll do Debian/XFCE. Btw at the time I installed that Ubuntu I was 3 Months into switching to Linux.

In the end its all good.

Poorly, I setup Mint while I was in town, a couple weeks later it won’t boot, can’t troubleshoot that kind of thing from out of state, so… Yeah

I gave my mom my old XPS 9350, with Fedora installed on it. Zero complaints whatsoever, so far, after like 3 years

Context: my mum’s laptop is so old that velociraptors used it as a heating stone. So around 2022 (two years after W7 EoL) I gave her three options:

• keep using Windows 7 - highly insecure, I heavily recommended against it, but it was still an option.
• upgrade to Windows 10 - easier said than done because her computer is old, it would definitively not run well, and it’s also a privacy nightmare.
• switch to Linux - it has some rough edges here and there, she’d need to adapt herself to a different workflow, but we might be able to squeeze a bit more performance from it.

She eventually decided Linux, under the condition that any issue that she got she’d ask my help. (That was already the case - I was already the one doing maintenance of her machine.)

So I did. I went for Mint because it’s the distro that I use, with Cinnamon there; it was closer to the W7 interface that she’s used with. As she got used to the system she started asking less and less for my help, except when the computer is slow (quite a bit - again, velociraptors and stuff).

Recently I run some test with MATE in that computer (as it’s lighter), and asked her if she could notice any difference in performance. She didn’t, and she hated the DE so it’s still running Cinnamon.

Had great success on Kubuntu. Set up the desktop to have two giant icons only: Firefox, and shutdown.

On Windows the constant popups for updating various components were causing much confusion Java, flash (back in the day), printer “drivers”, and of course windows itself would throw popups about updates requiring clicking buttons every time they used the computer, which was very infrequently, and cause them much confusion (“what does update mean” ?")

Meanwhile on Kubuntu all updates go “shhhh” in the background, and no more confusing “To shutdown, press Start”

I’m considering installing Fedora Silverblue on my dad’s PC. Install Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice as Flatpaks, show him the software center, set up his printer and wifi, set updates to automatic with no notifications, and hide the terminal from Gnome menus.
It would be like a debloated phone OS that requires no maintenance at all.

Im just not sure if updates are reliable enough to work without intervention.

I installed Ubuntu about 15 years ago and my Dad thought it was the new Windows. Had far fewer problems with it, but he kept hitting random keys and causing the most amazing errors. I just heard about EndlessOS which seems perfect for old folks.

https://www.endlessos.org/os

Debian is never a bad choice. Put some flatpaks there, backport some goodies, and install some kind of AnyDesk system. Put some KDE Plasma and they’ll think Windows finally runs well again.

During the pandemic after Win 7 went out of support Jan 2020, I changed the harddrive to an SSD, and installed KDE Neon on a laptop from around 2014. At the time it was an Ubuntu 18.04 based distro with a KDE frontend.

All I had to do was put Chess, Go apps, shortcuts to use common sites, put two web browsers (Chromium and Firefox) to separate my parents’ browsing and it was ready to go.

For the most part after I showed them how to use it they had no issues. I had to show them how to print, and scan things, transfer files from their phone (honestly doing it by email was less complicated). The computer had an icon in the tray that told them to update every once in a while (and the sudo password is 1234, they wouldn’t know how to even mess things up using the GUI only).

The slightly annoying issued that cropped up now and then was keeping the browser up to date to ensure that video sites didn’t nag my parents for the computer being out of date. Chromium eventually stopped seeming to work at some point.

Fast forward to today, only my mom uses it because my dad got a separate, faster laptop, cuz idk, they got tired of sharing. The laptop’s still humming along and quite responsive. Since Bionic Beaver has been end of support for a year now, I have to go back over and upgrade it to 1 or 2 LTS versions up. I hope this doesn’t introduce new lag or break my mom’s workflows which are 90% just web browsing.