I repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.

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rbanffy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I did that for my mom. At some point she learned to click through the Ubuntu updater and she kept her machine updated by herself. I only kept tabs on her computer via the server monitoring tooling I had on my network.

	▲	Barbing 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This sounds like the move, vs. having mum on Win+Chrome. If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members. Unforgivable btw Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That can't be literally true, no release of Ubuntu is still getting updates after 18 years. At some point you have to upgrade to the next release, and that's not quite as simple.

	▲	wing-_-nuts 30 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The 'upgrade to next version of ubuntu' has gotten pretty good these days. The only thing I would make sure to do is to have a separate home partition / volume so if you had to blow the underlying OS away after a botched upgrade, it's easily doable. For the life of me I don't understand why having a separate area for your personal files isn't the default on every OS. Just pick a reasonable size for the OS part (20-30G?) and give the rest to /home
	▲	LetsGetTechnicl an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The laptop is 18 years old, Ubuntu was installed in 2017.