Interestingly, not so long I go sat my parents down take a look at the latest Ubuntu. Just to see if they would be able to find the things that they mostly do (browsing, email, word) and if they would be comfortable with it.
I did this because I was kind of getting bored of their ongoing PC issues (“My documents are gone!”, “I get this and that error!”, “Someone called MacAffee wants me to pay for something I don’t understand!” etc).
No problem at all. All they needed was right there on the desktop.
Now I’m not saying Ubuntu Linux is perfect, but for these kinds of users I’d argue it’s probably the most user-friendly system around at the moment. Everything looks nice, and it’s all right there out of the box.
However, things tend to get nasty if you get slightly out of that comfort zone. For example, recently I had to screw around with “udev rules”, something I’d prefer to know nothing about, but I didn’t have much of a choice. But by and large Ubuntu is my preferred OS.
That said, one very important reason for me to choose java as my main development language is my general hatred towards any OS. They’re basically all ugly in slightly different ways.
Java gave me the option not to really have to choose in that regard.
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My mother uses her Android tab, primarily. She does everything on there. It’s quite interesting, because I can’t be productive on my 10.1" tab, and she only has an 8".
There are simply too many forking efforts and not enough concentrated efforts IMO. In stead of growing in select but important areas, Linux “blossoms” in all directions you can think of, but at a snails pace.
(“If you were walking in a field on day, and suddenly noticed at your feet a fully-formed and usuable operating system, would you assume it had just spontaneously evolved from Unix, or that somehow some higher power had created it and put it there?”)