[surgical_fire]

I actually did this experiment.

I had a super old laptop that I installed Ubuntu Mate and gave it to my mom who needed a laptop for simple web browsing/email/YouTube. My mom is totally illiterate when it comes to computers btw.

Worked like a charm for a few years until the laptop finally stopped working for good.

I think Mint would have beem even better. Hell, I use Mint myself. Best OS available by any metrics I can think of. I like it so much that I now donate some yearly 20 bucks to the project. Using it for free feels almost like a steal.

[didgeoridoo]

Same here, installed Ubuntu Mate on six super cheap Windows laptops for a psychology practice. All they needed was Firefox to access webmail and Firefox ESR for their cloud electronic medical records system (yep, using Silverlight in 2020).

I heard not a peep for tech support for years. One time someone thought she forgot her password, but it turned out she just had someone else’s computer.

Eventually the practice made enough money to get everyone on MacBooks, which honestly has given me more trouble (especially around all the system-level permissions for webcam and mic access seemingly resetting on random updates).

Never underestimate how many users just basically need a mobile kiosk instead of an actual computer.