I would say tell him, it might suck but another aspect is your wife might want to find her biological father in the future. It would be weird to do that without telling the man who raised her I think.
RedHat in the mid-late 90s here too. It wasn’t a great time for the linux desktop haha. I think I used afterstep or windowmaker back then. RPM hell was bad and hosed my system enough that Debian was like a savior with apt-get. Never really looked back from debian based systems since.
My only complain is it’s a little too easy to click on the sub instead of the title, other than that Jerboa has been great.