Indeed, Metro is both horrendous and confusing. You can save Windows 8.x with ClassicShell or equivalents, which put a real Start Menu back, though.

Actually, my elderly parents have the hardest time with Metro:
- no UI cues of what's clickable or not, what operations can be done
- no Back button
- very lacking apps
- very lacking live tiles
- very lacking Metro, you get dumped back into the Desktop all the time.

Metro was not designed for *any* user. It was designed to please the MS's drones' managers.

What, and miss an opportunity to sell Cisco hardware instead of Huawei ? You don't know who pays for politicians' campaigns do you ?

because the US are not restricting themselves to military spying. Political, economic and LOVEINT spying of "allies" are par for the game, too.

missed the part about the hardware...

I'd go with a full-on PC, because it's only marginally more expensive than a NAS, and it doesn't suffer from a NAS's limitations and bugs, though it does require a bit more setup, especially because given the price of Windows licenses, you should probably go Linux.

You can find Atom motherboards with 4xSATA for $70. Add an enclosure, PSU, RAM, you're at $150 (HP sometimes have good deals on their ProLiant MicroServer). Then you need disks: add up all your data, multiply it by 2 for starters, and keep in ming you'll quickly be at x4.. a single 4TB disk leaves you with a lot more room for further expansions than 2x2TB, especially since performance is not a concern (so, no RAID).

Someone should buy an extra USB enclosure and fill it with disks for backups, to be done weekly and then disconnected and hidden away.

BitTorrent Sync allows you to sync (2-ways) or backup (1-way) folders to PCs and devices (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android) over the Internet. I'm using it to do backups for my family...
It doesn't encrypt by itself, but each OS has that option natively, and you can sync an already-encrypted (at the source) folder.

Setup is very easy: source adds the folder in BT Sync, generates a 1- or 2-way key, sends that over to the destination via email, sms, ...; destination creates a folder in the OS, than adds that folder to their BT sync and supplies the key.
You can do that for any number of folders.

isn't that tomeyto/tomato ?

Android has passable handling of keyboard and mouse (and touchpad and gamepad and remote; pretty much all USB and BT devices are supported). A fair bit is missing (CUA-like ctrl+x shortcuts, right clicks), but, again, most users don't use those that much. Logitech have multilink keyboards and mice that make switching from Wintel PC to Android PC instant, if like me you have both.

The most glaring issue is multi-windows, or at least dual-windows (PIP or split screen) like Samsung do on their tablets and high-end phones.

Actually Samsung have a $100 desktop dock (HDMI out, USBx2, power, and I think sound) for their latest Galaxy S, Note, and Mega... Since I want a Mega anyway, I'll probably try that out too.

My adult parents, sister, brother in law... don't do any of that on their PC. Their Spreadsheets are very basic, the Android stuff is enough for them: Excel != "all spreadsheets". They don't modify PDFs (to do do a bit of wordprocessing, emailing...) , and they do their taxes on-line.

Also, I'm not sure computers from the dawn of the computer age edited PDFs (PDFs != wordprocessing, again, there's an app for that), and Android does do the rest.

Android has some flash support, not everything works. Most sites have moved on, luckily.

Have you actually tried Andorid on a desktop or laptop ? It does what 75% of users do with their Windows PCs, for a fraction of the software, hardware, sweat and tears cost. Plenty of apps too.

You don't know my mother. Nor my dad. Nor brother in law. Also, there are comptent Office suites (MS Works-level), uTorrent, photo and video editing... I actually have an Android *desktop* that works well enough.

an under-informed patient"

(or something to that effect)

Apologies to Dr Knock.

You're simply lying. There's a quite good email app (I'm using it with my Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail accounts)

There's not much configuration required, though you can do a lot more config if you want to, to get things exactly to your taste. An iOS-like ugly screen with only icons of default apps takes 2 minutes to set up. Widgets and 3rd-party apps are a choice, not a requirement.

I got the same situation and went with an Android for my parents. Here's why:

1- With many tablets (all Samsung ones, all rooted ones, many others), TeamViewer Quick Support allows you to remote control the tablet from your PC (like Remote Desktop in Windows), which comes in very handy when doing support to a complete techno ignoramus

2- Widgets make things real easy. The home displays his new emails, the weather, a picture frame of the grandkids, maybe some news, and shortcuts to favorite sites and games.

3- 10" is required, because eyes and fingers are old

4- the price is right. an Asus MemoPad 10 is around $229 (190 euros in my country), there's no reason to spend more.

Every Raspi can run Raspbian at no extra cost. Splitting hairs much ?