Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn't being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking 'intall', all without enough permissions to harm her computer.
Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.
you can add sudo permissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give her sudo permission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.
My dad never uses anything other than a browser and an email program. I guess the file manager? I'm pretty sure he never installed anything on Mint so far.
He still needs sudo to uodate tho.
/j then you don't love your mother enough to learn coding and make a mom-proof distro.
/uj oh my god I have ptsd from the one time my parents tried to switch to apple products. It lasted less than a week. Please don't let them decide to switch to Linux and ask me things.
It's a good thing that new and unexperienced users who want to learn 😃 on the internet get recommendations such as "use rm -fr / to remove the french language pack and fix your localization issues" and then ending up with an expensive, broken hardware (/s)
rm -rf / only deletes everything on the / partition and any currently mounted filesystems, since efi is its own partition and not mounted it wouldn't be touched