Sigh....I repeat,
"....if you expect OpenOffice to be indistinguishable from MS Office you are likely to be disappointed. But it's very very similar and will do pretty much everything MS Office can (and some things MS Office can't). But if you're incapable of making even quite small adaptations to the way you work then by all means spend your money..."
If Gertie's progeny struggles with the small differences in how-you-do-things between Word 2003 and OpenOffice 2 then she is likely to find the transition to Word 2007 (with it's radically revamped interface) insuperable.
Keef rather gives the impression that one has to be constantly tinkering with arcane configuration files to keep Linux going, which is unfortunate.
smb.conf is used to fine-tune network communications with Microsoft SMB based networks - it used to be a bit of a struggle to get going, but most modern distros have a nice GUI that lets you easily share or unshare stuff and control permissions without (gasp!) editing a textfile.
fstab controls how and what drives are mounted on booting - you don't normally have to change it unless you're installing additional drives, and if you know enough to do that then you can probably cope with the syntax.
As to editing sudoers (used to fine-tune who can do what) - on a home system there's absolutely NO need to change it unless you have very special multiuser needs, in which case you're a sysadmin and learn the syntax anyway. And you don't HAVE to use vi to edit it either (vi is obscure but certainly NOT rudimentary!).
And I'm sorry, but the fact is that virtually no really "mission-critical" runs on Microsoft software, it's just too unpredictable - mission-critical stuff runs on stripped down versions of UNIX, Linux, or in-house OSes.
NASA uses Open Source Software to control the Mars Voyager probes and for:
Aerodynamics Applications
Antenna Design and Satellite Communications
Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems
Bioinformatics
CAD CAM CAE
Chemistry and Thermodynamics
Crack Growth and Fatigue Analysis
Digital Signal Processing
Engineering Applications
Failure Analysis
Finite Element Analysis
Laser Applications
Metallurgy Software
Meteorological Applications
Navigation and Radar
Optics and Lasers
Optimization
Semiconductor Devices
Spacecraft Design
Visualization and Virtual Reality
X-Ray Spectroscopy
See
http://www.nasatech.com/software/index.html where you can download source for all of this.
You can download the public Version of the software NASA Uses to Operate Mars Rovers here -
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=910
"...usable after a fashion most of the time..."
