Which part of this isn't blindingly obvious to anyone having taken even cursory introductions to History of the Sciences? *sigh*

Ouch :-S

Yeah, I should have mentioned that I did get your points, and the one you are making here, again, about not being able to be an expert or even "literate" in every field is an important one.

I just picked on your choice for the two reasons that I wanted to promote myself, and because of my assumption that most people would be culinarily literate enough to at least hard-boil an egg by following a recipe for it, and equating that with a very simple, even if cli-based, task, going on to speculate on the fear of it being the main obstacle.

Only now do I realize, that my expectations might actually be set to high in both regards :-P

Simultaniously, over two machines. Am in talks with my movers' insurance company...

I, personally, have had a few recent new users almost give up, when the power died and NTFS screwed up the Wubi system image file during the necessary recovery. Guess where the blame was laid...

Has options for placement where *you* want to kid yourself into being a normal user by having them?

See above, but negate the booleans ;-)

Good for you. Now move along :-P

And in the opposite corner: How much support would they have regularly need, had they been stuck with windows :-P

They were, to their fault, trying to install some Adobe-thing, in order to run their favourite Twitter client, instead of going with something in the repositories. Would have been nice if they had taken a few minutes to find an alternative instead, since they later do go on about alternatives to other typical Win-apps...

Now, there's a deeply entrenched stereotype for you. Living alone, I don't do much cooking (or, hence, eating), but when I can ass myself into it, I do make a rather nice chicken in white wine of my own, or *find and follow a recipe* (!)

I'd agree that the normal user shouldn't normally see a cli interface, but failing to be able to copy and paste a few commands into one, with amble description of the process, progress and expected results, I'd take on your comparison, and say that's equivalent to looking in your Home Eq book, looking at the pot, the faucet, the stove, the eggs and then order out.

Granted, people as a whole have been cooking for a longer time than they have been using computers, but I will say that it's the fear, more than the required intellect, that's the problem. It still is a problem, though :-(

GNU/Hurd?

Most probably because they understand PostScript natively...