Linux

Other than printing, it goes well because they know if they were on Windows or Mac, I'll have nothing to do with it.

My mom got my XPS9350 i used to bring to uni, and at the moment, it has Fedora in it.

She repeatedly claimed it was a lot more straightforward for her to understand, compared to the endless inconsistencies and issues on Windows. All things considered, she is fairly tech illiterate too.

Plus it’s easy for me to remote into, in case something breaks

Not Linux but MacOSX.

They all know how to operate their iPhones, which we got them because it was like their iPad; it’s easy troubleshooting: how would you do this on your phone? Well, it’s exactly the same here.

Both parents are on openSUSE KDE. They only use the web browser and printer, so it pretty much doesn't matter what UI they use, but it really helped with their acceptance that KDE not only works similar to Windows, it was a clear upgrade from Windows 7, with it looking more modern and being a lot faster.

I also like openSUSE for this, because YaST allows me to administer their PC without cracking out the terminal for everything. It just gives them at least a tiny bit of hope that they might be able to do this themselves. And my brother, who's not a Linux person, has managed to fix things via YaST without my help.

Ultimately, though, I use openSUSE KDE myself, and that's really important.
If my parents mildly complain about something, I can proactively offer to change that, because I know all the settings of KDE and YaST.
Or if I don't know whether there's a setting, I can go digging for it on my system.

But perhaps most importantly: "This Linux thing isn't working." – "Hmm, it's working on my system, so there's gotta be a way to fix it."
That immediately shuts down any negativity, so I can concentrate on fixing it, rather than deflecting their grumbling.

I moved my elderly mother to ChromeOS and I no longer have to deal with the IT burden of supporting whatever she installed or broke this week. Move your parents to Linux if you truly enjoy being an on call unpaid helpdesk

Not Windows, but I rooted/cracked an old Chromebook for my mother and put Gallium OS on it because newer ChromeOS wasn't suported anymore. She was able to take care of affairs with it when my Dad passed and uses it daily still to keep in touch and manage her life. 90% of what she does takes place in Firefox, so as long as an OS has that and some basic utilities like a calc and text editor, she's good to go.

A $150 laptop bought in 2013 still able to accomplish modern tasks. It makes me sick thinking of the throwaway society we have created. When I pass by the neighborhood dumpster and see an entire perfectly fine big screen LCD TV with just a couple bad capacitors in the power supply. When I see entire vapes with batteries littering the ground. When Microsoft decides to arbitrarily kill off an entire previous generation of PCs with TPM.

Experience with relatives who had no prior experience with Windows or Linux: installing Linux for them was great, painless and also facilitates troubleshooting for me. No problems here. Mostly using Linux Mint for those purposes, it's a great distro for non-techy people.

Experience with relatives with prior Windows experience (but no Linux experience): a mixed bag. Some use Linux happily now (thankfully), some returned to Windows because they couldn't change their habits or have weird specific incompatibility issues with niche hardware which they also don't want to solve in a different way. I've kind of stopped giving support to those, since I don't want to give Windows support in my free time. I sometimes have to do it work-related, that's more than enough Windows contact for me. I also refuse to give buying advice on any products by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon or Google, with only very few exceptions (e.g. Pixel phones, because they're very secure and with GrapheneOS installed they're the best general mobile phone option). It's a bit of an ethical dilemma because I'd like to help the people but also don't want to directly or indirectly support those companies. I always offer them help if they use Linux or the things I recommend.

My wife is still on Mac OSX, but my son has embraced Mint. I’m a bit cheesed off that there aren’t (obviously) many kid friendly programming tutorial resources, other than maybe getting a sub to codeacademy. Other than that, all good.

Not successful. They don't even try to understand why I use a "non-standard" OS like a "unicorn" trying to be "unique," let alone try it.

Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

Put it on my 10-year-old son's desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she's getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.

My stepmoms aunt had a super slow laptop with Windows that I took and installed Linux Mint on and she is super happy with it. It's like a brand new computer for her!

She only uses her computer to pay bills and check Facebook and she haven't called me once to complain. She only tells me that it's working great.

I plan to install Linux Mint for my mom too in the future. I don't think my dad would be able to handle it tho. He barley know his way around the computer but he knows enough to do his work and I don't want to mess up his workflow.

I used to provide tech support for the family, and tried to move them to Linux to make them easier to support (similar simple use cases)

Thry weren't interested so now requests for help get a genuine "Sorry, I don't use Windows so I can't help"

No point imo, the people who benefit significantly from using Linux are the people who understand what it is

I try to get my techy friends on Linux and much of my family are techies anyway but I wouldn't try to put someone who won't be able to fix it themselves on it because then they're stuck if I'm not around to fix it

My SO runs Mint on one of her older laptops, and aside from an audio driver issue, I’ve had no problems maintaining it, and she finds it pretty user friendly.

I can't imagine switching everyone in my family to Linux. I think it'd be too much to support lol.

My wife is still on Windows on her own laptop. But for watching TV, she has been using Linux successfully with an appropriate GUI (vdr, mythtv, Kodi, Androidtv...) for 15 years or so :)