The fact that it's 2025 and there's no legitimate way to run a live USB with Windows baffles me.
In the case of my mom's computer rescue, as far as I can tell, literally the only legal way to recover my mom's Windows NTFS drive contents was to use Linux. I had to use Linux to fix Microsoft's incompetence.
I am quite confident that my mom would mostly be fine with Linux Mint on this computer; 99% of what she does on the computer is use Chrome, which works fine on Linux. Hell, Edge works fine on Linux now if you want to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem. The only blocker now is that I am positive that she will not use a computer unless it can run Microsoft Office directly on the computer, and I have not been successful getting Office 2016 or Office 365 running on Linux with Wine or Proton in my attempts.
Maybe for Christmas I will buy my mom a Macbook or something. Then she'll be forced to move to something better.
Yeah, Proton and Wine seem perfect for gaming, but I have never seen someone get Office right. That might be an audience difference or perhaps MS deliberately frustrates that attempt.
You could try 11 IOT LTSC[1] which is super-stripped down like an appliance. Set a few GPOs, get her files synced, set remote access. You could even do something like DeepFreeze if she's prone to clicking on the wrong thing. Restricting her to running Chrome and Office with Applocker is a possibility for her safety - I have literally interrupted scammers "from Microsoft" on the phone with the elderly and naive.
I'm not sure my mom even does anything that the browser Office won't do; she uses Excel heavily but she's not using any advanced formulas or VBA or anything, and her use of Microsoft Word is generally using pretty basic formatting. Honestly I don't think that she does anything that can't easily be handled by Google Drive or OnlyOffice. That doesn't matter though; the web browser is a complete non-starter, and if it doesn't have the Microsoft Office branding she doesn't want to go for it.
This didn't used to bother me much, until Microsoft decided it would be best to brick her computer because the people who run Windows Update don't know what they're doing. The one job of Windows Update is to not break shit, and they've proven incapable of that. Whomever works on it should be embarrassed for working on one of the most consistently hated pieces of technology know to humanity.
I thought about using one of those appliance releases of Windows, but I also don't really want to LARP as a Windows Sysadmin, especially since I don't even have a Windows computer in my house. If I were to somehow convince her to use Linux, there would be "security via ignorance"; she doesn't know anything about how to use Linux so she wouldn't do much outside of the easy, relatively safe path, and if she did break it then it would be much easier for me to log in and fix it with tmate or Tailscale + SSH.
In the case of my mom's computer rescue, as far as I can tell, literally the only legal way to recover my mom's Windows NTFS drive contents was to use Linux. I had to use Linux to fix Microsoft's incompetence.
I am quite confident that my mom would mostly be fine with Linux Mint on this computer; 99% of what she does on the computer is use Chrome, which works fine on Linux. Hell, Edge works fine on Linux now if you want to stay in the Microsoft ecosystem. The only blocker now is that I am positive that she will not use a computer unless it can run Microsoft Office directly on the computer, and I have not been successful getting Office 2016 or Office 365 running on Linux with Wine or Proton in my attempts.
Maybe for Christmas I will buy my mom a Macbook or something. Then she'll be forced to move to something better.