I dunno, I thought about this before switching to Linux, when I gave my wife a Linux box I had sitting around in a pinch during the pandemic laptop shortage—a lot of people these days just need a browser, and there’s not really much to go wrong with that. If something does go wrong you can just nuke the whole thing and start over pretty easily.

I’ve certainly run into some odd situations on my desktop Linux machine over the past 6 years since I started using it full time, but I think most of them were related to the nature of how I use the machine more than inherent instability. I think I’ve spent many more hours of my life unwinding piles of malware and bloat from non-technical folks’ Windows machines than debugging this one.

My parents used Linux as their home computer for three years, regularly updating it and doing basic document writing with open office, as well as all of their banking etc

They don’t know what Linux is, and know nothing about tech, they just know that we had a 30 minute lesson on “here’s Firefox, this icon means you need to install updates, here’s how you print”.

Oh and this was Linux Mint back in ~2016

Things have only gotten easier since then