My mother, over 90, uses the exact same arrangement which I set up in the mid 90s. Linux, mutt, emacs, fvwm customized to be very simple. Whenever hardware stops working I just need to transfer the setup to a new machine and everything remains identical.

It would've been impossible to do this with commercial software as basically nothing has a 25+ year old support life. Because everything is open source, nothing needs to change.