That'd work, too. But doing that I still had to occasionally/rarely fix my relatives laptops. I think after some of the major updates and the stupid Brother printer drivers messed up and needed manual intervention. But Debian is pretty stable. But with that said, it's not the only option. I can imagine an atomic distro doing a good job, too. And being low maintenance, or at least fail in a way my mom could handle. I mean that's how some modern devices work anyways. Be atomic, have A/B updates...

Atomic distributions have read only filesystems for nearly anything but /home, it makes it way more reliant against loss of power then just a normal Debian. I had a few people with distributions that broke due to filesystems corruption.