[baldfat]

Don't want to be that evangelist guy BUT OpenSUSE really deserves a second looks and it is non-technical family member friendly. They are super stable and provide one-click install off the web like Mint, but it install them as a regular repo which makes updating them a breeze.

On the technical I love OpenSUSE for zypper, build (Any software you need is probably on there and it will even build for other distros), rolling releases in Tumbleweed, and the best KDE default environment for over a decade..

[auxym]

OpenSUSE is great, YAST is the best "control panel" app I've seen in any distro, you can configure antyhing without ever opening a terminal or vim. Zypper has also been more robust for me than apt (I've seen apt-get hell once or twice).

That said, stay away from Tumbleweed (rolling release). In my experience it's been even less stable than Arch or Sid. In the past I've had kernel updates making the machine unbootable, though thankfully the distro does keep all previously installed kernels, easily selectable in GRUB. Just yesterday I banged my head against a year-old bug that pgadmin3 is broken because it hasn't been rebuilt against the distributed version of wx (come on).

[baldfat]

When was the last time you tried Tumbleweed? It has improved a ton and especially with this latest LEAP release.