More than a few years ago I set up an old PC as a Skype machine for my folks. At a certain hour, on Sunday they would press the power button and the PC would boot Linux Mint. Skype would run on startup together with TeamViewer. I would initiate a call and they would click(the hardest task for them) on the green button. At the end of the conversation all they had to do is press the power button again which was programmed to initiate a shutdown. Linux Mint never installed any updates without asking and you could disable even the asking part, which I did.

This smooth process lasted a few years until Skype stopped supporting 32-bit processors. After that, I would log in remotely with TeamViewer, start Firefox and would begin a Google Hangouts call. Being an old PC, this wasn't as a good experience as it was with Skype.

A year or so later I bought them an iPad and started using FaceTime. This worked fine until Apple changed something on their servers and call notifications stopped working. Then, six months later, Apple logged out my folks from their account. After a 15 minute phone call I managed to guide them to enter a username and password somewhere in Settings. A week later they were logged out again, but this time after entering the username and password their account was locked. Luckily, I also installed Skype on their iPad, so now we use Skype again.

My ideal solution would still be a PC/laptop with Linux on it, that has updates disabled and can be remotely controlled. Unfortunately, Skype with its forced update behavior is the problem. It can stop working at any point or introduce UI changes that are confusing.