The Hard Six

A friend of mine recently asked me if I thought Ubuntu was suitable for his mother-in-law. In a nutshell, he didn’t want to spend the money for a MacBook given that she is a very basic user. So he bought a Dell laptop with Vista Home Premium and both him and his mother-in-law couldn’t stand it.

The basic user problem is an interesting conundrum. It’s hard to justify purchasing a $999 MacBook (and Office, and AppleCare, etc…) for a user who checks their email, surfs the web, and maybe whips up an occasional spreadsheet. But most casual users I know can’t stand Vista. The consensus seems to be “everything is different, but I don’t see any tangible improvements.” XP is often a viable option, but it’s becoming harder and harder to buy a laptop with XP on it, and lets be honest: XP is old and lacks a lot of functionality that is par for the course in a modern operating system. Apple experienced a similar stall in the 90s with System 7, but System 8 was hailed as a vast improvement and most users migrated quickly. On the other hand, Windows XP is still the dominant version of Windows nearly eight years after it’s release.

So, what about Linux? Ubuntu is “Linux for Human Beings,” right?

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