This was what I thought until I installed ubuntu. Maybe it's the honeymoon period, but it just works. I doubt your mum is doing heavy graphics work or playing games and those are the only two things that are keeping me on win 7. The interface ubuntu is nice, it's stable and programs can be installed in one click.

I'm not saying its perfect, just that it's much, much better than I thought.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but my parents have been on Ubuntu for two years now, and they've called me for help one time during, when they bought a new printer.

They migrated from the Mac, actually, so it was just "here's the new Firefox icon, have at it." and they were good to go.

My grandfather uses Ubuntu daily on his old Dell. He uses it to check emails, surf the web, and play hearts on Yahoo. Works quite well, and I don't have to worry about viruses or malware. Before Ubuntu, he had an old P3 600Mhz machine and I ran Xubuntu on it, and it was still fairly easy to use.

My mother DOES use Ubuntu, and I've been called about problems 20% less in the past two years compared to previously, with her using Window XP. There's nothing difficult about it - her browser, email, camera and everything work fine. The interface is actually much more simple than Windows. What's the problem?

That's not been true in my experience. My parents found Ubuntu easier to use, especially w.r.t. installing software (Synaptic vs. a-different-process-for-every-app).

I've been thinking about setting my mom up with Jolicloud (http://www.jolicloud.com/), which I believe is based on Ubuntu.

She has an HP netbook with an 8GB SSD, and WinXP gives her "running out of space" warnings all the time. She doesn't download anything, but her pagefile.sys file quickly grew to 2GB. After limiting the size of the pagefile, clearing a bunch of other temp files, and uninstalling everything I could, the problem came back within a few months. I think it's an indication of the collective ignorance of Microsoft and PC manufacturers that they would sell a "netbook" that can't reliably browse the web.

My step daughter is studying law and history, and has run Ubuntu on her laptop for the last 3 years. She's not particularly technical, but she loves it and has even converted some fellow law students from what I've heard. I showed her how to use LyX (a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor) and many of her professors have commented on how professional her papers look :)

I couldn't agree more. I recently started using Fedora and often had to dive into the depths of Linux to get simple things done/working.

This is going to be unpopular, but the majority of open-source software is not near the polish needed for the non-tech public to use.