I highly recommend fedora kinoite for people who don’t want to do maintenance or don’t know how.

It being immutable makes updates incredibly easy, and makes it much harder to break the system, and kde is best for people who are familiar with windows.

Whatever you choose, make sure you’re familiar with it since you’ll be the one that has to fix everything that’s wrong. 🙂

I suggest not giving their user sudo rights and having your own user with sudo rights for installing apps, doing upgrades and so on.

It will be very useful to have SSH installed if you need to assist them remotely.

If you want to help remotely I also recommend Tailscale, it creates a “mesh VPN” private network where your PC and their laptop can see each other over an encrypted connection that can also break out of ISP NAT (no port forwards needed). Since it’s encrypted it’s ok to use simple unencrypted VNC to view their desktop to help when needed.

I can give some pointers if you have a home server and want them to be able to use web apps on it over Tailscale. One very useful example is Syncthing, which can sync files between a folder on the laptop and your server, where you can back it up further incrementally with Borg Backup or whatever you use. You can sync their entire home directory if you want or you can just have a ~/Sync dir where they put only what they want.

Last but not least, if you can swap the HDD consider putting in a SSD instead, the difference will be night and day.

I’d go with XFce. I have it installed on many old laptops that I have given away to my cousins, nieces, and mom. Works like old Windows if you modify the panels (remove the bottom dock, bring the main panel down), and then you put some sane defaults, like setting up sleep (NOTE: you will need to edit a file to make xfce go to sleep unattended), enabling natural scrolling, enabling the login manager to show username so they don’t have to type it every time, etc etc). But after all that is setup once, xfce is the best case for an old laptop.

Whoa, that’s a lot of comments. Thanks for your suggestions, guys. I will think about this.

Debian is old and full of bugs. “Stable” means you are stuck with faulty, but known-state software. To have a carefree distro where you don’t need to assist at all I recommend Bazzite (it’s not just for gamers). Tested updates are applied automatically

Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very windows-like + automatic updates = ideal for people who don’t really want to have to learn anything new (assuming your parents are like mine in that respect).

Disclaimer I am on Fedora Kinoite with soon Plasma 6 too.

Staying in an older Fedora Kinoite version will spare you from the breaking changes. Like currently 38 instead of 39. I would use ublue kinoite-main. You can disable animations, baloo etc. and have a very minimal experience. (Kinoite is way lighter than Fedora KDE and doesnt even include Gwenview, Okular or Kate)

Have a look at EndlessOS. Easy Desktop, immutable Debian base afaik. VanillaOS also has a Debian variant.

Immutable stable Distros are really needed. But I think Fedoras rpm-ostree is currently better, because it uses a git-like approach. I also think it is overcomplex and moves too slowly, so I imagine something may surpass it.

Automatic upgrades like traditional distros are not enough (they only annoy users but dont really apply them), you need really automatic ones.

Ublue has ublue-update on some editions, which is really nice. Fedora wants to implement some half baked solution I guess. If your Grandparents are always at home and on power that is no problem though (metered networks, low battery, AC connected).

One word of warning about Debian, you may be already aware of this: resist the urge to add remote apt repos that replace packages that are provided by Debian (same package name).

It’s ok if the packages are named differently even if they do the same thing, as long as they don’t pretend to be the same package. One good example of this is the Docker repo, which gives their own packages different names from the Docker packages on Debian.

If the repo overwrites native packages you will eventually end up with dependency relations which cannot be solved by apt anymore (most often happens when you remove a 3rd party repo). This usually comes back to bite you after a couple of years when it’s time to upgrade to the new Debian release – and you can’t.

aptitude can sometimes figure out a way to straighten things out but it can involve uninstalling/reinstalling and then upgrading a huge amount of packages which is never fun.

Gnome won’t break. If you don’t want them calling you up in the middle of a work day saying, “why did the bar at the bottom of the screen disappear!?” or “Berny, my screen turned black!”, install Gnome

Removed by mod

The Plasma desktop is well supported and is pretty close to a Windows experience.

I hate Gnome with passion because it’s nothing like Windows. I tested Ubuntu 2009 and the Gnome DE is what made me not like Linux. I did not know at the time that KDE Plasma also existed

Gnome is simple. Gnome is native for GTK apps, which are majority. You can turn on classic taskbar, turn off virtual spaces, add minimize button and it is now a classic user experience.

I don’t understand this obsession with Wayland vs X11.

On Arch I choose Gnome and the underlying technology is picked for me based on hardware of the machine.

I recall having X11, because I had nVidia card. I bought AMD video card and it started to run Wayland without any effort on my side. It was a while ago.

Arch would require you to make more decisions, which may lead you into the woods. Use Manjaro, which made Arch tech decisions for you like choice of network management stack.

I tried Manjaro last week on laptop. It has a polished user experience. Pick to use non-free drivers. Use Libre Office instead of free office. Install Firefox and chromium. Done.

Gnome just added full search and it is included in Arch and shall be in Manjaro in less than 2 weeks.

The advantage with rolling release for your parents is that you will never run install again. You will never need to upgrade version of Debian or Ubuntu. Just update OS every time you visit them, no more frequent than once every few months, not less than twice a year.

Manjaro has polished software installation experience at graphical user interface level.

Replace the HDD with SSD. It will run faster. You can configure any DE to look similar to windows, maybe Gnome to the lesser extend. One think to keep in mind when choosing the distro, you have to support it. Good luck.

Why don’t you let them choose?