Not so, it was true for my 86-year-old mom. I installed Linux Mint and put the Chrome browser icon on her desktop, and that was all she used. She only checked e-mails and browsed like Facebook, etc. Every month or so when I went to visit, I’d just run the updater. Never broke and I never really had to do anything. The reason why I put it on, was her PC was getting old, and Windows was getting super slow. So it was win-win. She did not even know it was Linux.