My sister's husband who is 73 and not confident with computers has just given me a Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 on it to "fix". The last person who "helped" him with it has locked him out of the system without a password. It already has at least one virus. I'm strongly inclined to install Fedora on it for him. He has said the main things he wants to do are Facebook and eBay so it is very much an "OS as a means to run a browser" situation. I am not one of those people who gets grandma to run Linux just so I can feel smug about it though. I actually need it to work for him. Has anyone any experience of getting a confused relative to use a free OS? Am I being foolhardy? Any other thoughts? Thanks.
My wife uses happily Arch for almost 4 years now and never complained. Mostly for web based stuff and some simple office documents. She has absolutely no idea of OS-es, networks and administration, but that's actually a good thing. This means the user does not need any admin rights and they'll just start up the web browser or LibreOffice and save their documents in ~/Documents. Printing should also never be an issue, just make sure CUPS is started automatically at boot.
And updates... yeah, you'll probably have to do that for them. I don't know how Fedora handles updates, but in Arch you basically have to type "pacman -Syu" in the console and it does it for you. Mostly successfully, but at very rare occasions an X bug or something might prevent X from starting and they need to have you repair that.
It's quite easy to make a ponty-clicky shortcut to a bash script that does the update automatically and teach them how to update themselves once a month.
As far as stability goes - WOW! My wife used Windows before and it was horrible. It would get slower and slower over time and filled up with junk. Since she started using Arch, it's always fast and works quite well. She even gets angry when I start updating it - "what for?" she asks, "it works quite well anyway."
So having a grandma run GNU Linux makes a lot of sense for me. Very much more than any other case. You'll lock in a safe and stable environment, once you configure it it will just run and stay fast. And they'll use the browser to access everything they need anyway.
If you install steam they can even play some games on it.
The same applies to FreeBSD, by the way. Once it runs, it runs.