For both her, my mother, my mother-in-law and my my step-mother-in-law it is great. From their perspective they click on Firefox, thunderbird/gmail link, OpenOffice, Skype , etc they get what they expect.
Only unlike when they were running Windows they don't have to call me over every 6 months to de-worm their sick machines. They all use Ubuntu in gnome-fallback mode (so it looks like gnome 2.x). Now days I only have to deal with rare hardware issues from my family's machines (and PC desktop are easy as hell to service).
P.S. Reflecting I think Linux is actually ideal for very technical users (programmers/sysadmins/etc) and very basic users (icon clickers). I think "power users" are actually the people who have the hardest time. They have a use case that requires more leaning than the basic users one, and can't just figure it out intuitively like the technical because they don't understand how everything actually works like the technical users do.
Helping a couple hours a year is a small price to pay for giving them a rock solid experience AND not support a company like Apple (at least in my book ;) )
P.S. The nearest Apple stores are also 150-200+ miles away for them...
Without being snide, I have actually found facetime is great for support calls, as they normally call me on it when there is a problem. I can just say, point it at the screen...
Linux can be great for alot of people, provided you set it up for them.
My computer illiterate wife uses Linux PCs all the time with no issue (albeit for basic tasks, but then again that's all she ever used Windows for either).
For what it's worth, my brother & I set our mom up with a Slackware machine running dropline GNOME (this was years ago). It was a good thunderbird+firefox combo, very stable. I remember the uptimes past 90 days. She needed some software for work that only worked in IE, so it had to go eventually.
When it does work, it works really well. The only requirement she had was that none of her icons changed: there were several links to specific websites she wanted on the desktop (bookmarks be damned), arranged in clusters. It's no trouble at all for Gnome, with launchers, of course.
The poster I responded to mapped out why logically PC, Linux and Android is the best combined platform, but then suggested that it is not really true is intangible reasons ("Not everything can be reduced down to specs and numbers").
I was expressing that I follow his logic and think this logic is valid. And not just for techies like me, but lay people as well.
I think that many tech people use apple because its what they think hip techies use and that is what they want to be. Its a brand, and image. Apple also has an aesthetic that many people like. I'm not saying people don't have a right to make up their own mind, but I have a right to think they are choosing wrongly.
I never said that they don't exist, and I would agree I must value them less, that is implied by the choices I have made. There are also intangibles that push in the opposite direction as well, say such as Apple being a comparatively evil tech company in regards to opensource interactions, market tactics, patents and labor/human rights.