I installed Asahi Linux on my Macbook Air recently and while it definitely took more effort than your grandparent would be capable of, it wasn't too bad. Getting FDE working was a pain for sure though.

The overall experience is good, aside from a few big areas: sleep mode still drains battery a ton, like 20-30% a day or more. And battery life in general while using it is pretty bad. And Firefox constantly runs out of memory and crashes.

Hopefully it improves soon. Even despite these issues I'm not going back to MacOS or Apple ecosystem again despite being a big fan of it and user for the last 7 years.

I mean, I pretty much agree with everyone else here that Apple software quality has gone to shit recently but the issues you describe are just awful.

I would not use a laptop with those issues no matter the problems MacOS has currently.