Title: Last year I left a laptop at my parents&#x27; house with Linux Ubuntu installed. I had it hooked up to their TV for streaming movies.<p>So, this week he gives me a call and tells me that his Windows laptop battery died and he&#x27;s been using my Ubuntu laptop. He tells me about how he found the Libre Office spreadsheet and he&#x27;s been filling out his work documents (he works in high-end custom home construction) with it and transmitting it with Google Docs.<p>Then he tells me that he was able to add their house printer and print his docs from the machine using the instructions from Ubuntu&#x27;s help system.<p>I was pretty much floored. My parents are NOT technical people. I offered to get him a Windows license for the machine but he said that it&#x27;s working fine for him.<p>People make jokes about the &quot;year of desktop Linux&quot; but if my dad, without calling me ONCE, can use Linux productively to get things done, then, in my opinion, Microsoft is in trouble. As far as I&#x27;m concerned, their claim to usability in the PC OS world is dying.<p>Maybe this doesn&#x27;t mean a whole lot in the big picture, but Linux has cost Microsoft at least one end-user license for an average computer user. For my family, I&#x27;m not sure how else you define a &quot;year of Linux desktop.&quot;
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