Tried this with my mother. I had to rebuild the machine with Windows 11 LTSC afterwards. Which she hates but less than Linux which was totally unusable for her.
YMMV but this isn't a real option for a lot of people.
YMMV but this isn't a real option for a lot of people.
One cost me a 100 mile round trip to turn airplane mode off after I assume she'd accidentally whacked the mouse wheel button on the icon instead of the browser which for some completely unknown reason does that?!?!?!?! I'm not sure that was even what she did but I spent ages trying to work out how she could have even done that in the first place.
Gnome, on the other hand, provides a totally different UI, so user immediately identifies that it is different and needs to be learned a bit. But thanks to Gnome being pretty coherent and simple in how UI works, it usually takes very little time to learn and then they just keep using it. I experimented with my parents, father is 70, mother 65, and they both earned default Ubuntu very quickly and don’t have any issues using it, unlike win10+, which constantly raised questions and frustrations that something changed (MS likes to bring idiotic widgets to panels and menus after updates no matter that nobody asked for them).
I did just consider buying her a Mac Mini and be done with it. That seems, to this day, the most suitable solution.