I’m having a very hard time accepting that your 60 year old parents, after seeing Linux, said something along the lines of “What was windows doing for us?”
I teach adults 40-80 on how to use Windows products. I’ve taught over 5,000 people this year so far. The vast majority didn’t even understand the concept of browser tabs or copy/paste. These are people well into their professions in corporate office jobs. They don’t even know what an operating system is.
linux has 2 really good target audiences people using it as a near chrome book like experience, and ultra advanced users who want fine control of the system.
its everyone else in the middle that needs to play how much do i have to tweak in order to do what I want.
As a retired software dev, for me Windows is simply a longtime habit enforced by past work environments. I did use Linux for over a year on my main PC but went back to Windows so I could keep using my old copy of Visual Studio. My deeply conditioned shortcut keystrokes didn't work in VSCode - in fact, why did they change so much of the UI? But now that I'm used to VSCode, which I only use for hobby coding anyway, there's no excuse and I intend to go back to Linux by year end.
I got my parents in their 70s to use Ubuntu for a few years now. All they use is a web browser and word processing application for .docx files. They used MS Word for years and I found Only Office has a similar UI and opens word docs.
At one point I gave them an older laptop running windows again and they hated it. They wanted Linux back.
I had my mom on Ubuntu for most of the 2010's, and then the macbook it was on had catastrophic hard drive failure around the pandemic, but then I was like, you don't work anymore, why exactly do you NEED a computer to begin with? So now she literally doesn't have a computer and just lives mobile/tablet OS life, which in a nonprofessional context seems perfectly serviceable these days.
Last time I tried convincing em to install Linux, they said "I'm on it" to end up ghosting me after like I was a weird, random beggar they met on the street.