I had my 80 year old mom on Linux Mint for 15 years, from about 62-78, and she didn't even know it. She tried to show me her Windows with exactly one problem 15 years in, and I was present with the Mint boot screen. Problem at that point was her laptop, not Mint. Grandmas tend to do very simple things, and the OS can just chug along forever without problems.
Okay, people say this. Could you please, and this is not a rhetorical device, it's a sincere question: how do you keep the browser updated without updating the operating system? Or if you are updating the os, doesn't that change the user interface? And if the user interface is changing, doesn't that confuse your grandmother? I installed Ubuntu for my mom and after four years Firefox was out of date, and the website for banking she'd use would have checks where logging in was only possible if the one if the user agent was recent enough. One can fake that, but I didn't want to. But updating Firefox meant updating Ubuntu, which means that every single icon and every single menu position changes, and I didn't want to have to teach her where everything was again. How do you avoid this?
I haven't dealt with this for her in a few years, but basically:
Pin all their apps in favorites and they will persist through updates. Updates don't overwrite desktop shortcuts either (although like other os, a couple might be added that need to be removed). This might be more difficult in gnome, I wouldn't know since I am firmly in the kde camp.
To stay as up to date as possible, use the mozilla apt repo:
In my experience, the Mozilla apt repo would still have dependencies on system libraries that can only be installed by updating the operating system to another LTS. Like, the Mozilla Firefox package depends on libssl, which depends on another package and that other package can only be updated by updating the operating system, which typically drastically changes the look and feel of system menus and things that are not easily gleaned by looking at a screenshot of an empty desktop. Maybe this isn't true of KDE and the interface remains stable across to update cycles. Thank you for the suggestion.
