Can I please ask how technical they are, and what distro are you using? And that what are they using the OS for? I'm looking into this passively for years now, and I'm really interested in actual people's experiences.
Based on what I’m seeing from computer usage by my relatives, they wouldn’t care less if they can do these things: 1) Browse the web 2) read pdfs and docx 3) use a word processor (and maybe a spreadsheet 4) play medias like music and videos.
A lot of people are ok using their phone as their primary device. And a chromebook and access to google suite would fill the rest of their needs. I’d install linux mint and they’d only notice the interface is different.
For simple use, Linux is actually pretty simple and useful. It's the inbetween where you require some kind of power user features or specialized software and aren't a developer type where things get hairy.
They are as non-technical as it gets. Debian stable does the automatic security updates for them flawlessly without breaking the workflows. The OS is used for browsing, writing documents in LibreOffice and looking at downloaded pictures/documents.
That sounds good and I myself landed on Debian too, after trying most popular distros over the years. Did you install UnattendedUpgrades, or is automatic updates a setting somewhere?
I have tried Mint, and there was a update mechanism - it was either Ubuntu's do-release-upgrade or something on top of that, I honestly can't remember. But the system didn't look like a normal installation after it, that's for sure. Fonts were a bit weird, some settings were migrated and some weren't, it didn't feel right.
I haven't used mint in ages (I used LMDE for a long time though, exactly because it was rolling release), but back in the day at least, the official upgrade procedure was basically "just reinstall lol", maybe it changed now
