[Amadiro]

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.

[vacri]

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.