linux.conf.au/debiancon: January 2003
Portrait of a User: Monica

Why:
We thought about what my mother-in-law needed her computer for: email, web browsing, some word processing and keeping home accounts.  Maybe play some simple games - maybe our kids would use it for some games when they are at her place.  As an added bonus, she didn't need to pay for all the proprietary software to accomplish all this which just about halved the cost of her new computer! A distinct advantage for a retiree.

On top of this, I convinced her that she would have less reliability problems (which is true except maybe for her printer which turned out to have hardware problems :-)) and I could maintain it remotely over a modem link (initially).