My parents are in their 90s and have been using Linux Mint since I replaced their previous desktop about five years ago. Only for email and web browsing, and a little writing (Libre Office), but they have had few complaints. (I have had a huge amount of trouble getting newer kernels to use a USB wi-fi dongle, though. That's ridiculous.)

Huh, last time I tried to help someone switch, they didn't really like it -- but that was a couple years ago (It was a switch to Mint, and it was long enough ago that this was probably the best pick).

"Not liking" != "Not working", especially when the user being introduced to a new system is expecting things to "just work like they use to"

My wife had an older laptop, which had a failing hdd and I used the opportunity to swap for a SSD and asked her to try Ubuntu.

Yeah, she had a lot of questions at first, but eventually she got used to it. She got a new laptop and had to go back to Windows due to her work, but whenever she is just browsing or videocalling anyone, she doesn't mind using the older laptop.

Also, guess which laptop always has issues with the printer?

> Also, guess which laptop always has issues with the printer?

In my experience any laptop on any system will have issues with the goddamn fucking printer :-)

I had an old dot-matrix printer connected to the parallel port for a very long time. Could "print" with just "cat file.txt >/dev/lpt0". It was great. Downside was I couldn't use it in the evening as it woke up the neighbours.

What's not to like, if Firefox and Skype are the only apps they are using?

The obstacle that wasn't overcome in this case was the lack of MS Office and the unfamiliarity of Open/Libre Office, if I remember correctly. Personally I can't stand office suites, so I don't really see how this could be such a big deal, but "actually this kind of software is just destined to suck" is not very compelling.