The answer is yes, twice. I've given plenty of laptops restaged with Debian+KDE to tons of neighbours, family members, even schools. About 1 in 5 people can't

The answer is yes, twice. I've given plenty of laptops restaged with Debian+KDE to tons of neighbours, family members, even schools. About 1 in 5 people can't deal with the change and flees back to windows, typically the power user who likes to fiddle with the config forever. Fine by me, and I'll even support them as long as they don't want me to pirate anything. Most people don't care much. A surprisingly big group finds it a breath of fresh air and don't believe a laptop can work this well. Applications? Firefox + libreoffice + krita gets you there 90% of the time. For the remaining 10% you need to seek out alternatives, they are very specific individual needs. In general, a solution can be found with a bit of googling. Wine deals very well with what's left. For bigcorps, I used to think Windows was too entrenched, but it turns out plenty of companies have hidden pockets of linux users. I've just found a group that reformatted their laptops to linux. They get more work done than the rest of the office. Their admins are none, the wiser, as they run a hidden qemu with windows containing the corporate crapware like mcafee and sccm invisibly in the background. They depend on corporate apathy, and as long as the machine stats match up with what the main office expects, it works. The Linux desktop is far from perfect, and stuck in an eternal 90% finished limbo. But compared with e.g. XP, Windows usability has seriously regressed and is now also eternally 90% finished. I mean it when I say it became worse than Linux. Choose your poison, and live with the consequences.