Every other day something breaks. We're spanning the entire range here, from petty stuff like Firefox missing fonts, to straight up the kernel not booting. And obviously everyting in between, like apparently the only way to receive Exchange mail is to pay for a Thunderbird add-on. Or setting up the VPN requiring arcane SELinux magic.
I honestly don't see how one can recommend desktop linux to someone without at least a minimal knowledge of how the OS works and some decent terminal-fu.
As sad as it is your parent is right. Non-technical users should just get a chromebook.
I've been happy running Cinnamon on Ubuntu LTS releases, and I like what I see playing with KDE as well. I've never had a kernel fail to boot (other than by hardware failure), and AppArmor is, IMO, far better at staying out of the way than SELinux. I can't help on the Exchange stuff, I've never had to deal with that.
It would be a little easier to just run Mint instead (Cinnamon being native there), but on Ubuntu you can just "apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment" and then choose Cinnamon the next time you log in.
What SELinux magic you had to do for VPN? All VPNs that I've set up were fine with just clickety-click in the GUI.
When somebody is used to (for example) Windows, he then approaches any problem the Windows way. But the Windows way may be not the optimal one on any other system. But since it was optimal on Windows and the person doesn't know anything else, then he will see suboptimal results anywhere else.
It is not just Windows -> Linux; the same problems will be experienced with Windows -> macOS. Even Microsoft had the same problem, when they redesigned Windows elements and the uproar it caused.
There was a period of maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was really killing it with their defaults & configs under Gnome2 and it really was quite nice, but before and after that, I've found going minimal and all hand-installed to be the only way not to constantly be angry at my machine and experiencing all kinds of mysterious brokenness.
In fact, accepting that what you can productively and pleasantly do with desktop Linux is a different (though overlapping) set of things than what's productive and pleasant under Windows or MacOS, and not trying to do those other things at all, is the path to contentment under desktop Linux, I think. At least until it gets a lot better, which, with all the Wayland shake-ups, seems really far off, if it ever happens. I think it's more likely Google's replacement will get actually-seriously-no-bullshit-quite-good for desktop use, before Linux does.
For the most part, though, I just stay on MacOS these days. All the time I lost to Linux during my decade or so of using it as my main OS on desktops and laptops taught me a lot, so wasn't completely wasted, but I just can't be bothered anymore. I just want to start up the machine and get stuff done. MacOS gives me plenty of glitches, I don't need even more, plus a ton more crashes and weird behavior. And I do want my computer to just do a bunch of nice stuff for me automatically, without constantly (instead, merely often) breaking or glitching or requiring me to set all that up.
Maybe if I get really really lucky Haiku will be usable for my use cases by then, but that doesn't look very likely.