Yep. The XP on my son’s computer went kaput. He gets to be the guinea pig. The rest of my computers have become so slow and bloated, I see no reason to continue with Microsoft. I use Redhat at work, so I figured it would be no big deal. So far so good...
I've been a RedHat/CentOS fan for 15 years and my only trouble with getting used to Ubuntu has been that they put things in different places and do things in different ways from what I'm used to with RedHat family. But that's more habit than better/worse.
I'll be interested to hear how you like the desktop (assuming they're still using Unity or similar as the default install). I couldn't stand that, and reverted to a Gnome UI. But then, I'm a traditionalist. ;-)