I may recommended the same for my parents.
20 years ago Ubuntu was the go-to for baby's first Linux. Is that still the case?
20 years ago Ubuntu was the go-to for baby's first Linux. Is that still the case?
Unless you want to be the perpetual IT support for your parents, I would recommend getting a user-friendly immutable/atomic distro, like Aurora[1]. Aurora uses KDE, which most Windows users would find familiar. It is immutable, which makes it very hard to break, and it uses atomic updates (basically updates either apply or don't: there's no partial state which can break the system). And in the rare event that something does break, you can boot directly to the previous version right from the boot menu, no need to run any manual rollback commands. My 70yr old mother also uses Aurora and has zero issues.
This is why I recommend immutable/atomic distros for newbies, especially if the person installing it doesn't want to be a 24x7 tech support for that user.
Also, the /usr merge thing has caused some issues for users, requiring manual intervention[1]. Not a big deal for techy users familiar with the terminal, but this isn't something end users might want to deal with.
Image based immutable distros don't have issues like this.