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I switched my grandparents PC to linux, Ubuntu in particular. It covers everything they want to do (light web browsing, some text processing, printing, transfering images from their phone/camera to the PC). Has been working great for 3yrs now.

I've also noticed that installing adblock helps, since there's less shady stuff to click.

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I've had my parent's PC on Linux for almost 10 years (mostly Xubuntu, was on Mint for a bit). I initially expected to reinstall Windows after a few months, but it worked pretty well. I told them that it looks and works[0] like Windows, and they were off.

[0] As for as using the GUI is concerned. Normal people don't care about the internal workings of their technology.

> I've had my parent's PC on Linux for almost 10 years

I did this with my daughter, and never told her it wasn't Windows. She didn't know or care for years -- until she developed a taste for cutting-edge video games.

What do you use for a mail client? Besides web-based?

They were already using Thunderbird.

this proved to be very effective in my case as well, a gnu\linux distribution + ublock origin.

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