My parents are both ~60 y/o and run Ubuntu since roughly 5 years. I gave them a crash course over the course of 3 days and my mother took notes on all the things that she uses daily - spread sheets, word documents, images, browser, Skype etc..

I've set up dynamic DNS and a few other things so I can help them if something goes wrong as we live 12000 km apart. After a year I realized that none of them ever asked me anything. So I asked my dad "Why do you never contact me to help with the computer?". He responded: "Well, everything just runs!".

Before, with Windows, I can't even count the time I've spent fixing their laptop.