There may be many Windows-specific functionalities missing, but it's certainly possible to work around those. Why do you think OSs like Ubuntu or Red Hat are not suitable to be used as enterprise desktops?

I worked with in the real world at a non tech focused company regularly struggle with WordPress, Twitter, and Email. Just because HN is tech focused doesn't mean everyone's coworkers are.

My housemate is a regular user (not power user) and a known potterer. He loves figuring things out and patching things together, and wanted to try a linux desktop, so I set him up with one. He didn't want me to help him out, as he wanted to find things out for himself, to try it without me coming in and 'just fixing it'. I watched him struggle for months, then he admitted defeat and went back to Windows. He still (theatrically) shivers if we discuss the topic.

I've seen this experience is seen in the wider desktop space - the only time a free desktop is suitable for low support usage is when it's so locked down it's not really a proper desktop environment anymore; that locked down, it's more like an appliance. When something goes wrong with a free desktop, it's not just a matter of figuring out what went wrong, but which are the right steps to fix it. This error on Gnome, will this fix I found for Fedora work on Debian? Is the problem in Gnome desktop or in the distro?

My colleague once had a problem with something in Ubuntu, and found that there were four different solutions depending on which of the last four releases were in use. When your changing releases are years apart (Windows) this is less of a problem than when they're 6 months apart. I was pleasantly surprised when I loaded up ubuntu 14.04 and saw that it looked the same as before.

Note that I'm not in the enterprise environment, only that I've had to help a lot of people with changes from OS version to version, and understand the need for stability... which is a reason why the path Win8 took particularly puzzles me, given Microsoft's strong position in the business world. I think that the free desktops are getting there, but haven't quite arrived yet.

Your anecdote may tell us something about the "typical grandma end-user" situation, but it is totally irrelevant for situations that arise in large "enterprise" IT facilities, where the admins set everything up for you (in some central, network-booted/installed image), and the users don't really have to figure out anything. Configurations are centrally managed with cfengine etc.

Where I work we have around 10k RHEL workstations, and they are all centrally managed. Users neither install nor uninstall software, they don't set up printers, they don't set up their own hardware configurations, ...

Another example is Disney animations/pixar, where all animators use RHEL workstations.

Your colleague may have given up on ubuntu because he couldn't get "desktop dungeons" or "plants vs. zombies" to run without windows, but in a coorporate setting, management does not generally consider that a priority.

You make valid points, but please stop saying that naive users are grandmas. I even specified he was my housemate - how many elderly people do you know share a house? It's even the wrong gender. The world's non-power computer users are not limited to grandmothers (who seem to be all about desktop use) and toddlers (who seem to be all about iOS).

Also, my colleague didn't give up on Ubuntu. He just noted four different ways to fix the given problem in four consecutive six-month releases.

I have another anecdote for you. My mom, a 79 year-old retired tourist agency owner and occasional tour guide had a Windows machine. When I gave up on fighting viruses on her Windows XP machine, I moved her to a Mac running OS9. Then I set her up with an Ubuntu box.

She does her upgrades through the GUI (after the machine prompts her), runs mostly Firefox, imports her photos into Shotwell, shares them with her friends (on e-mail - she doesn't like Facebook), writes letters (and mail the printed copies) and seems generally comfortable with that.

She moved from Gnome 2 to Unity without thinking twice. She prefers Unity.

My housemate didn't have problems with browsing or photos either. Things like a pair of bluetooth headphones, which had linux support, were a nightmare (for him) to get sorted. The desire to use a pair of bluetooth headphones really shouldn't require a power user.