Both on Ubuntu, but Mint, etc... would probably be fine as well.
I personally wouldn't run Ubuntu for myself, I think it falls into some of the same traps as desktops like Windows where I don't really have complete insight into what packages are running. I run Arch & Manjaro on my own computers. But I'm not the target demographic for distros like Ubuntu.
The big things when I'm setting up a computer for someone else are:
- the distro should be popular enough that software/advice is available for it.
- it should run some kind of user friendly desktop environment (Gnome, etc...)
- it should be stable enough that it's not going to randomly break for them (so I put people on Ubuntu LTS releases, none of these people need the latest and greatest versions of every software package). I do not want their computer to break when I'm not around.
Aside from that, I don't think the distro matters too much, and I think there are a lot of distros that fulfill the above criteria. The big strength of Linux for less technical people is that you need one technical person to set it up once, and then you don't really need to touch it afterwards.
Anecdotal, but over the past few years I've debugged more random Windows issues for people than Linux issues (where random in this case means "I woke up today and my computer didn't work"). I've been hearing multiple issues from people where their Windows laptops just have graphics drivers that stop working one day, or where the HDMI port suddenly doesn't output anything. If I'm handling support for someone else, I basically never want to get a call like that, and I never want to try and debug it remotely.
So Linux means that those calls mostly just go away. I only need to worry about their hardware once. I think my nieces have had maybe one driver issue since I installed their computers -- and they're actively installing proprietary software like Zoom for their schoolwork. My parents never install anything, so a Linux install for them is basically just set it and forget it.
I personally wouldn't run Ubuntu for myself, I think it falls into some of the same traps as desktops like Windows where I don't really have complete insight into what packages are running. I run Arch & Manjaro on my own computers. But I'm not the target demographic for distros like Ubuntu.
The big things when I'm setting up a computer for someone else are:
- the distro should be popular enough that software/advice is available for it.
- it should run some kind of user friendly desktop environment (Gnome, etc...)
- it should be stable enough that it's not going to randomly break for them (so I put people on Ubuntu LTS releases, none of these people need the latest and greatest versions of every software package). I do not want their computer to break when I'm not around.
Aside from that, I don't think the distro matters too much, and I think there are a lot of distros that fulfill the above criteria. The big strength of Linux for less technical people is that you need one technical person to set it up once, and then you don't really need to touch it afterwards.
Anecdotal, but over the past few years I've debugged more random Windows issues for people than Linux issues (where random in this case means "I woke up today and my computer didn't work"). I've been hearing multiple issues from people where their Windows laptops just have graphics drivers that stop working one day, or where the HDMI port suddenly doesn't output anything. If I'm handling support for someone else, I basically never want to get a call like that, and I never want to try and debug it remotely.
So Linux means that those calls mostly just go away. I only need to worry about their hardware once. I think my nieces have had maybe one driver issue since I installed their computers -- and they're actively installing proprietary software like Zoom for their schoolwork. My parents never install anything, so a Linux install for them is basically just set it and forget it.