> My dad was becoming more pro-privacy so I got him Linux Mint, and something broke that put him in GRUB and it frustrated him so he asked me to change it back.
This is exactly why I don't recommend Mint or any Ubuntu-based, or even any normal (ie, mutable) Linux distros, for newbies. I learnt this the hard way thanks to my mum, who experienced the same breakage twice - once on Xubuntu, and again on Zorin. Since then, I switched her to an immutable distro (Aurora) over an year ago, and it's been flawless so far. Updates are automatic and never interrupt her, and she's been thru two major OS upgrades with no issues (for image-based atomic distros, a major OS upgrade is treated like just another update and makes little difference to the end user). And unlike regular distros, image-based atomic distros don't have to worry about any potential dependency issues or package conflicts occurring - the update will either apply or won't, there's no partial/failed state.
Therefore for non-technical newbies, I would highly recommend an immutable distro such as Aurora[1] or Bazzite (for gamers)[2], because you never again have to worry about updates. And in the rare event that an update breaks something, rollback is as simple as choosing the previous image from the boot menu, and that's it - no technical steps or knowledge required. This sort of stability and ease-of-restore is far beyond what Windows or macOS offers, which makes Linux a no-brainier.