[hawski]

I am currently working on experimental Linux distribution for my parents that would be a bit ChromeOS-like.

Ideally for my mom ChromeOS device would be ideal. For my dad it would be not enough as it seems in your case. Maintaining my parents computer is something that always gets back to me. Now I am also living few hours worth of travel from them so it is even less convenient.

Older computer couldn't handle Ubuntu of the time. So always something was not working correctly. Updates on every system are constant source of headaches. My dad got used, but much more powerful machine. I installed Windows 10 for them thinking that Windows is now better and that with perpetual updates it will be out of trouble for me. I installed also Chrome Remote Desktop for service. My dad preferred Linux experience. I hoped that he just needs to get used to it. He was happy with Windows Store for a while, until few of the games he enjoyed playing failed in strange ways. It would not be that bad, but updates on Windows 10 are huge and with 20-30GB free space left after installation it does not update anymore. It only downloads the update, tries to update and fails - on every reboot. My dad bought an external HDD so probably it could be resolved. However he still would like to have Linux in there - old computer was very slow, but it did not fail in such magical ways. For now I plan to install Ubuntu for him and see how it will behave.

For my own learning experience and a bit of enjoyment I started working on my own Linux distribution. The most important thing for me is to have hassle-free updates like on Chromebook. I prepared squashfs image with Firefox and intend to have two partition scheme for rootfs. Updates would be then just download and restart away - completely automatic and in case of failure you would still have previous working image. I could test the image locally and optimize it for fun and profit. For now I base it on Gentoo to build lean system in a similar fashion to ChromeOS build.

[slight EDIT]