He's open to switching to linux, but I've been out of the game for a while and not sure what to recommend. In olden times, Ubuntu was my go to - is that still a reasonable default or is there a new game in town?
They primarily use the internet and I guess they might need to print sometimes (which I'm assuming is going to be a hassle no matter which distro we pick).
The main reasons I recommend Aurora is that it is immutable, atomic and semi-rolling.
- Immutable means your core system files are read-only, making it resilient to accidental file deletions and corruptions.
- Atomic means updates are done as atomic transactions - they either apply or don't, there's no chance of a partial/failed state, no scary "black screen" after upgrades.
- Semi-rolling means you'll always be on the latest version of the OS, with major versions pushed out every 6 months. The main difference compared to other distros like Mint is that you don't need to worry about doing a big and scary OS upgrade, as not OS updates AND upgrades are image-based and atomic, with no chance of dependency issues or conflicts. So as an end user, a major OS upgrade is treated like just another normal update and it makes no difference to them, providing a seamless update experience.
By the way, I would strongly recommend against Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros like Mint, because they all tend to fail at upgrades [2]. Atomic distros don't have this problem.
A few months ago my girlfriend started trying Linux and went with Pop!_OS on my advice. For most regular use it does indeed work fine, but she has needs for specific software that only exists for Windows. And that's where quite a few issues appeared. Both on the 22.04 and the new COSMIC version, the Lutris/Wine combination has... quirks. It's a pain to get her software working. It also just randomly _stops_ working. Whereas on a spare machine with just Ubuntu 24.04, all that stuff just works instantly.
Granted, not the most typical usecase, but even non-expert users can have hobbies that require obscure software. And more important than anything is that their software continues to work easily. I'm not sure I would recommend Ubuntu to a non-expert. It has its own quirks.
This comment ended up being less coherent and more ranty than I wanted, but there's a non-expert's Pop!_OS experience.
Anecdotally my experience with printing on Linux has actually been smoother than Windows in recent years, but we're talking about printers here so YMMV.
You haven't used a Canon IP-90 printer. :-)
I don't use that, because I don't need the simplest thing, I'm a more complicated person. But my wife does, and it's amazing. I set it up for her. I tried out a handful of desktop environments the other day to see which one is the easiest to use, cinnamon is the only one I tried that I'd recommend, which surprised me. KDE just gets in your way every chance it gets, others just deviate too much from the windows concept of a desktop for someone who isn't into Linux to start using, and the rest have quirky behaviors and bugs that just make life harder.
As far as the distro, you'll hear mint a lot, it's what Ubuntu used to be back when it was the easiest to use distro. I'll always recommend it to people that just need a desktop that works. Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop, your parents won't even notice except that they don't have forced updates and login to outlook and all the terrible cruft, they'll just have a computer that works for them again.
The oldest person currently using mint is my 84 year old female friend.
The trick is to set it up perfectly for them. So they just do all the things out of the box as they would on a wIndows machine.
She particularly enjoys not having to wait days for an update to install.
In general Linux user exp. is more about Desktop environments than Distribution. The "what's under the hood?" question is not important as long as YOU are responsible for the maintenance (installing apps, backups, updates, etc), so you could even go NixOS, Arch or Gentoo, if you'd like. I'd also recommend to add an invisible automated backup (syncthing or restic+hetzner storage box).
These are very beginner friendly setups, I'd pick Debian for long term stability where you don't have to update much. I'd also recommend KDE/Plasma due to familarity with Windows UI, as it's much easier getting used to than GNOME.
Elementary has a MacOS look and feel, with nicely integrated default apps (in terms of UI design) so depending on taste I'd pick that. PopOS has a fairly nice integrated UI, too.
No atomic or immutable.
Keep it simple, keep it mainline, stick with large user-bases where help can be recieved.
Also, I've seen it for Kali, but I'm guessing it exists for others - it's called Kali Undercover or something. It makes your GUI look a good bit like Windows.