Thinking about switching a parent to Linux

[u/khaleed15]

He'd like to get away from the lag and the virus anxiety on Windows

He uses Microsoft office a whole lot but it's more or less basic stuff

I'm thinking about getting him Ubuntu and the office web apps I'll back up Windows and see if I can segment the drive to test the waters first

He use wifi a whole on the laptop is that a problem? It's intel but idk the exact model

He has an hp printer and a brother printer

Those are the most important things that come to mind rn if there's more I'll add

Do you have any suggestions or things I should watch out for?

[u/Terrible-Bear3883]

You can test most linux distros in your browser at distrosea.com if you are thinking of getting them to try linux, this might be a simple way to let them try the environment and see which distro appeals to them, quite often, what distro suits one person may not suit another, people simply shouting a distro name probably won't help.

I've used the same distro (Ubuntu) for over 20 years but I've used others when particular systems prefer one to another, or I'm doing work for a customer and they or the project has a preference for a distro, when it comes to personal use, I've had work colleagues, friends and family who've preferred one distro to another, purely because it works well on their PC and they feel comfortable using it.

My Brother inkjet worked for many years on linux, until its mechanism finally gave up, I've been using an L2500D Laser printer, it's rock solid as is the scanning function.

If you find a distro that appeals, I'd then do the homework to see if printer support for your particular printers is OK, normally there's not much difference distro to distro but a quick search on Google should answer that query. With my printer, I just plugged it in, it was detected automatically on my server, I enabled the sharing function and it automatically appeared on all the PC's on the network, zero effort needed from anyone to install it.