70-year-old mother considering the move back to Windows from Apple. Any advice?

My soon-to-be 70-year-old mother has been using an iMac for the last 5-10 years. However, she has had a long series of issues with it. I think, more often than not, it's due to user error. As you'd imagine, she's not the most savvy with technology, as much as she likes to think she may be. The problem is, I live halfway across the country and can't help her with setup and troubleshooting, and nobody else in my family is any more capable than she is, so she's kind of stuck on her own and she's looking for advice.

I'm a Macbook user myself, but looking to switch to Surface as soon as I can afford it. I've advised her she may consider switching back to a Windows 10 device as well. However, I'm only familiar with the Surface line (and the Studio is well beyond her needs). I believe she will get far better value out of a new Windows 10 desktop setup than she will out of a new iMac, but I don't know which direction to point her in.

Does anybody have any advice in this situation?

Cliffnotes:

>Mother is 70-years-old and not very tech savvy.
>Longtime iMac user, deciding whether to switch back to Windows.
>Primarily uses computer for email, web surfing, and simple games.
>Needs as low maintenance and most "setup and go" as possible.
>Must be a desktop setup and not a laptop/mobile device.

Looking for ideas for brands/setups. I haven't shopped for a PC/desktop setup in at least a decade, so I'm embarrassingly ignorant to it myself. Thanks in advance to anybody who can help.

Install Gentoo

/thread

What about you take her out to the park. Chat all day, remember good times, buy her something tasty and take her home after a perfect day.

She's is getting old, user. You must cherish all this moments with her. I would have loved to have done it at the time but know I can't.

>Primarily uses computer for email, web surfing, and simple games.
Why do you need a desktop then?
I just gave my tech illiterate mother my 3 year old 2000€ gaming laptop and soon realized that the only thing she does with it, is playing flash games and watching some movies online and collecting a nice set of malware on it.
I think I'm going to buy her a tablet for her birthday, it's a 10x better solution than that bulky thing and probably far easier to use.
The less possibility to fuck up, the better.

So I'd say get her either a Win 10 tablet,iPad or a MacBook.
No reason at all to go with desktop here.

Get her a chromebook.

Damn nigger, who gives a fuck, do something more interesting than stressing her out about computer hardware. She's almost 70, man. She needs good times not fucking hardware spats.

user this is probably the best thing you can do Chromebooks are easy to use and get the job done, she shouldn't have any issues.

Setup Ubuntu for her. It is designed for old ladies, and will require way less troubleshooting from your part

>Easy to use
>Linux
>Easy

Ubuntu is way easier to use than Windows 10. Windows 10 have all sorts of hidden menues. Suddenly she might find herself in the start screen and the start button gone.

Windows 10 is not intuitive if you have 1 old lady and give her windows 10 then you will have at least 1 weekly call with some problem, something she has downloaded, some popup or she might have gone stuck somewhere in that awful UI.

Ubuntu on the other hand is intuitive. I have gone from weekly calls from each family member to hearing nothing for months and they manage fine without my help (because they don't do anything advanced. Just read their email and the news). Ubuntu is order of magnitude easier to use than Windows 10. Even for people who have used windows 7.

your grandma just wants to play games OP don't be such a faggot and give her windows

True, you win haha.

The only reason I said that was because there might be some issues with drivers, the kernel, terminal. I imagine he could set it up so that this won't become a problem.

Yeah I know, and it did not use to be the case. But the behaviour on Windows 10 is bizzare. It has embarrased me because I am an IT professional and then suddenly I press something on Windows 10 and get stuck in one of their many strange screens and you have to do some trial and error to get out of it. Windows 10 is about as intuitive as VIM is. (picture related)

I assume he will do the installation, even though it's basically just pressing "next" it still is a scary thing to do for someone. These days Ubuntu usually does drivers perfectly fine. The only time people have to manually install drivers these days is if they install Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch or something like that.

And with Ubuntu she likely won't need to ever see the terminal. most tweaks have some GUI version. It is surprising how much they are able to do themselves if you set up her email and so on.

Those "You have a virus" popups don't look anything like something on Ubuntu so they get to be more sophisticated computer users. And if they download some exe file then they can't run it. Ubuntu also has it's very own "app store" where they can download stuff and that should also be recognizable these days.

updates and that sort of thing can be done with a cronjob without need for any restart or bothering the user. It is a pretty painless experience. If you are going to set up a computer for someone who only use it for internet, email and light gaming then it is ideal.

Honestly everything has worked for me with Windows 10, I haven't had an issue at all with it. I guess it depends, not everyone has the same issues.

Although Ubuntu is easy to use because of all the reasons you mentioned, I think that a Chromebook would be even better and easier. I think there is literally nothing that can go wrong with it, it's literally made for old people.

>Must be a desktop setup and not a laptop/mobile device.

Why is this?

Anyway you can literally just get her a cheap case, a 300w PSU, a skylake pentium G4400, a H110m motherboard, and 8GB of DDR4 Ram (probably overkill but she might accidentally rice up her browser like pic related).

Oh and obviously you build it for her you incompetent fuck.

this

>tfw my grandparents refuse to use cell phone/computer/smartphone/etc.
>my parents only use iPads

I don't have to deal with these problems thankfully

Get her a Chromebox.

>Grandma wants advice for her new computer
>You say no because she's old

You anons are so kind

set up ubuntu on a i5+SSD setup

>tfw wage cuck asian mother worked child labor in china when she was 12 on motherboards
>tfw don'thave to teach her how a computer works

Too good. My white dad on the other hand doesn't know jack shit to save his life.

Give her Windows and make two shortcuts to TeamViewer or something.

Install Ubuntu on literally any machine, and maintain it for her over SSH.

PS: Doesn't matter whatever model she gets, pick a 17-24 inch screen or so and once she has Teamviewer started do the simple settings she might need such as larger fonts / mouse pointer & quick bar shortcuts. Trivial.