[ThePythonicCow]

Your Mac versus Linux for low cost email/web/text systems depends on how cost sensitive the user is, versus how tech friendly they are.

My father-in-law is an absolute cheap skate, but fairly patient with techie stuff. I can hand build a cheap PC for less than even a MAC mini (which didn't exist when he got his system.)

And for the three things he does, web, email and a text diary of his trips, there really is not enough difference in usability to amount to a hill of beans. Either way, you have to learn a few things.

[HAL9000]

My father-in-law is an absolute cheap skate, but fairly patient with techie stuff. I can hand build a cheap PC for less than even a MAC mini (which didn't exist when he got his system.)

If he knows how to work the basic commands like cd, cp, vi, man, grep, regular expressions, etc. - and he doesn't care about the awful GUI - Linux is okay.

But it's downright cruel to make a typical father-in-law use Linux.