For both her, my mother, my mother-in-law and my my step-mother-in-law it is great. From their perspective they click on Firefox, thunderbird/gmail link, OpenOffice, Skype , etc they get what they expect.

Only unlike when they were running Windows they don't have to call me over every 6 months to de-worm their sick machines. They all use Ubuntu in gnome-fallback mode (so it looks like gnome 2.x). Now days I only have to deal with rare hardware issues from my family's machines (and PC desktop are easy as hell to service).

P.S. Reflecting I think Linux is actually ideal for very technical users (programmers/sysadmins/etc) and very basic users (icon clickers). I think "power users" are actually the people who have the hardest time. They have a use case that requires more leaning than the basic users one, and can't just figure it out intuitively like the technical because they don't understand how everything actually works like the technical users do.

Linux can be great for alot of people, provided you set it up for them.

My computer illiterate wife uses Linux PCs all the time with no issue (albeit for basic tasks, but then again that's all she ever used Windows for either).

For what it's worth, my brother & I set our mom up with a Slackware machine running dropline GNOME (this was years ago). It was a good thunderbird+firefox combo, very stable. I remember the uptimes past 90 days. She needed some software for work that only worked in IE, so it had to go eventually.

When it does work, it works really well. The only requirement she had was that none of her icons changed: there were several links to specific websites she wanted on the desktop (bookmarks be damned), arranged in clusters. It's no trouble at all for Gnome, with launchers, of course.

The poster I responded to mapped out why logically PC, Linux and Android is the best combined platform, but then suggested that it is not really true is intangible reasons ("Not everything can be reduced down to specs and numbers").

I was expressing that I follow his logic and think this logic is valid. And not just for techies like me, but lay people as well.