And I've had had no problems with installation of most of the Ubuntu releases on my hardware and have friends who encountered problems installing Vista on their systems a while back. So I guess our anecdotes cancel each other, eh? Funny how individual data points don't necessarily mean squat when talking statistics. ;)

I think grandma's success rate will depend more on her specific hardware than on whether she's installing MS or Linux. Also, it's little unfair to compare a typical Linux installation (which includes a multitude of applications) with a typical MS Windows install (which includes practically no significant applications).

If they release the particles under the GPL, would that square their viral properties or just double them?

Wow, that is just sad. You've been a fan of Linux for well over 15 years, but still can't find a distro that works out of the box? You have a lot more patience than I do. All of the distros that I've been using since '95 (Yggdrasil, Slackware, Redhat, Knoppix, Mandrake/Mandriva, and Ubuntu) have worked "out of the box" (i.e., off the floppies, CDs, internet, etc.) just fine for all of my family's uses. If I spent all that time being frustrated and let down by any operating system, I'd have given up on it long ago.

Sheer market dominance, momentum, and large advertising budgets play big roles in this. Except in very rare cases, a new and better product will not take over an existing market rapidly. It takes time. But I think the trends we're seeing are definitely in Open Sources favor.

To use any word processor to create "good" (for some definitions of "good") quality documents with proper structuring, it takes time to learn. Personally, I've probably wasted more time fighting MS Word's formatting (e.g., arbitrary bullet indentation changes, anyone?) over the years than the time it took me to learn enough LaTeX to be happy and productive.

Strange analogy. Guess I can't see the point in that, whereas LaTeX does satisfy several document generation capabilities that either word processors can't do or do poorly (e.g., automated high-quality document generation, self-documenting methodologies, author focus on content without constant distraction of formatting concerns).

I suspect you won't agree with these points, and that's fine. In my experience, most people just can't see the point of LaTeX and think it's outdated '80s technology. And the people that hold that opinion almost universally have never really used LaTeX. Funny thing is, for those seriously trying it on a large document, most that I'm aware of feel the week or so getting used to the markup was time well spent.

There are a fair number of LaTeX users who have various complaints about the syntax, need for a GUI, etc.. (And some of these are being addressed.) But they continue to be LaTeX users just for the reasons I note above (among others) -- nothing does a better job for their purposes.

Just my experiences and observations.