My mom is over 2000 miles away and she's had Ubuntu for over 3 years now. It has been really easy to administer and help her use it. Every time I visit I upgrade the version of Ubuntu and make sure that networking works reliably, after that anything can be done remotely.

She is quite comfortable with it. What was interesting is that this is the first computer she has really used. Most people I know started on Mac or Windows then saw Linux. She is the only person I know that started on Ubuntu.

For emergencies I keep extra boot-able OS partitions including the original Windows XP that came with the machine. When I show it to her she thinks Windows is not very easy to use and looks clunky. That always make me laugh.

My kids have all grown up with linux and we homeschool. Their only windows experience has been seeing me run a VM occasionally. My wife is a converted linux user as well. She can't stand windows the few times she's had it on a laptop. I always got pestered until I installed ubuntu on it.

I sometimes wonder about all the Geeks and hackers out there running Linux/BSD whatever and their kids/wives. Is there a waiting boom of non-windows educated kids about to break on the scene?

Recently I took my Debian/Ubuntu Linux-only laptop to the Philippines to see in-laws on a vacation with my wife; she had never used Linux before. In SE Asia it's a WinXP world, almost everyone runs pirated copies so there's not much interest in FOSS or knowledge of Linux, OS X, or any alternate OS.

The first thing she said upon logging in to the guest acct was, "Linux is FUGLY!", but I think she's started liking the fact that it boots quickly and can do everything she needs with OpenOffice, evince, Skype, &c. While she is not particularly committed to FOSS, after this trip away from home without Win she has come to see the light. To ease the transition I installed Chrome, added all her contacts to Pidgin/Jabber (all her old friends from the Philippines use Yahoo! products) and I don't think she misses WinXPProSP3 at all.

My cousin had a terminally infected (malware, spyware, adware, etc) XP machine for his kids to use that was brought to its knees by all the viruses. Had the pleasure of steamrolling it with Ubuntu, they've been happily surfing since.

same here - I just wish skype (with webcams) was better supported.

For a lot of people (and businesses), that is a blocker. I managed to get a UVC webcam, but still had to get a PPA v4l repository and build some drivers.

I think it is good that ipods will be supported out-of-the-box in Lucid (Rhythmbox). The same should happen for Skype.

On that front, one should get rid of all the useless games and instead have : 1. a nice Twitter app 2.Scrivener-like app

These are killer apps for a lot of people who use a Mac - especially the young student demographic.

How long ago was this? uvcvideo was merged into mainline quite a while back, so almost all [recent] webcams should work pretty well now.