Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.

Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.

you can add sudo permissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give her sudo permission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.