Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

I am a family friend to a older couple, and for reasons I don't want to discus, the wife who was doing all the needed things on the computer like paying the bills, checking the bank balance, checking emails, printing, etc.; and suddenly now at the age of 72 he needed to learn to do those things.

It was not easy, especially because there is nobody who can teach you how to pay your bills, and if you want to pay a bill of say 8 EUR, you need to pay a fee of 10 EUR if you go to the bank in Sweden and do it there.

He had an old Toshiba laptop which was not usable anymore (that is why they bought a new laptop some years ago which his wife took with her), so I installed a lightweight Ubuntu version on it, installed Thunderbird and Firefox and connected the printer. It took quite many times for me to show him how to log in into the bank account and how to pay the bills, and he still struggles with it sometimes, but at least the OS itself is not hindering him in doing what he needs to do. There are basically two icons when he opens the computer and then he opens the browser and writes the bank name into the search field and then google shows him the website so he can log in and do the thing.

I don't like Word and thankfully, don't need it myself. I'm perfectly fine with word.office.com and google docs, as I neither need nor want the advanced features. I also don't mind if the document has an occasionally entirely different layout and sometimes even an entirely broken one.

If you are forced to use the doc/docx formats and need to share these files with other people, you'll be forced to use Microsoft Office and by extension Windows. There is no viable alternative.

all alternatives only work if you only need to produce PDFs and don't need to collaboratively edit said doc/docx

and exactly the same applies to the video conferencing tools. If you can choose your own, appear.in works fine from linux for example.

If you need to use Ciscos or SAPs (for example) video conferencing tools, you'll be plain out of luck on linux, unless you're fine just joining other peoples sessions (never hosting one yourself)

They got one of these cheap Walmart computers in 2002 or so. After one too many disasters (computer slow due to antivirus sw, Windows update failed, etc), I switched them to Linux for a few years. But that was a problem due to hardware compatibility, especially with their printer.

I ended up having an iMac to give them in 2007 (after I'd switched from FreeBSD to Mac, and decided I could not stand the Mac UI & switched back to FreeBSD on another whitebox). They've been on Mac ever since, now on a Mini we bought them a few years ago. Pretty much no support calls since then. A few times a year I make sure they're doing sw updates and haven't installed dodgy Chrome extensions or toolbars, but that's about it.