[cleeus]

I moved three relatives who's computing skill vary between "What is a file, again? Help me, my Internet is gone?!!" and "How do I use this scanner to get that document into a PDF file and send it via Thunderbird?" over to Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE, 14.04). They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.

[ekianjo]

> They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.

If you don't want to even worry about that, include a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade as a cron job and everything will be up to date without them doing anything.

[MattJ100]

You're not wrong, but just want to note that Ubuntu has a number of options in the graphical settings interface to control updates, including automatic installation of (either security, or all) updates.

[SXX]

There are unattended upgrades for that. Though you might need to add some dpkg options such as "force-confdef" / "force-confnew".