Desktop Linux is worlds better than it was when I last used it seriously ten years ago, but it still has plenty of issues. I'd be reluctant to recommend it to a

Desktop Linux is worlds better than it was when I last used it seriously ten years ago, but it still has plenty of issues. I'd be reluctant to recommend it to anyone non-technical. Case in point: I recently bought an EeePC 1005PE and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. This is probably the most popular netbook sold today, but networking and power management were completely borked under a fresh install. Figuring out what was wrong and fixing it was a distinctly non-trivial process that took hours and a couple of reinstalls. Even then, battery life under Ubuntu is drastically worse than the same hardware running Windows 7.