As seen on Slashdot at http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F21%2F1319238&from=rss:

I have migrated several clueless windows users to Linux and I can say from real world experience that anyone can use Linux if all they do is browse the web. The problem comes in when people expect to do what they are able to do on windows and they cannot. This Christmas season the unexpected rared it's ugly head. My Neighbor got an Ipod and she tried to load Itunes to get her cds on her Ipod. No go. She had to call me and I had to dig into forums to get it going with Songbird. Songbird kicks ass BTW. Another user calls me up saying their daughter just gave them a digital picture frame. So they can see their grandkids. Guess what? they tried to load the software that came with it. When that didn't work they were lost and stuck. Another user called me up with a Garmin GPS that they could not update and another with a TomTom GPS that will not update on Ubuntu. Then I have one lady that brought home a perfectly good Lexmark laser printer from work. They bought a new printer and gave her that one for free. Well it won't work on her PClinuxOS. I can tell users till I am blue in the face to do their research before they get hardware for the Linux PCs but I can't control the presents and gifts that others buy them. This is a BIG problem. I keep getting asked "Why won't iTunes work on Linux? It works on windows?" On the flip side, a nursing home near me got 8 PCs donated to them. I got there to install them and they had pirated versions of WinXP with a message "This version of windows is not genuine" etc. I told them to buy WinXP pro for 8 computers at $199.00 each plus AV etc. They balked at the price tag so I put Ubuntu on all the the PCs. They called me 2 months later. They had 2 more WinXP PCs donated to them. But they had Legit versions of XP on them and were pretty clean of crapware so I told them I'll just connect the PCs as is and I did. They called me back a month later complaining about the 2 windows PCs. What was the complaint? The residents "Old people" did not want to use the windows PCs because they were already used to the Ubuntu PCs and said "It was too hard" compared to Ubuntu "Icons were too small" "Cannot zoom desktop"(compiz zoom feature) etc etc. The list went on and on. The elderly residents just could not go from Ubuntu to windows after using it for just 2 months. No one would go near the windows PCs. so I had to go back and wipe perfectly legitimate versions of XP of the 2 boxes and put Linux on those too.

 By the way, the link is to an article where Scott McNealy says "The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products." The same man who donned a penguin suit after resisting open source for years!