Well, to be honest I don't think many massage therapists or mother-in-laws
(if not tech savvy) will connect their MS boxes to a linux box themselves, they
will call an IT service provider, or you, or even worse, me (but I'm ok with
mother-in-laws, provided they have good cooking skills). Anyway, most SuSE
things *do* work out of the box, but here you have to manipulate a windows
feature which simply can't be automatically handled by samba.

In many cases concerning the Linux desktop, you would be right. In this case, this statement is out of place. Your mother-in-law is not going to be configuring Samba if she converts to Linux because she won't want to set up a file share. She won't know what one is, or even that there is a hard disk in the machine or that it isn't secretly eating her cheese while she sleeps.

There are definitely some places where Linux has holes that need plugging, but for setting up a file share or other advanced tasks like that, I'm comfortable with people having to edit configuration files without worrying about people being able to port to Linux. If you can't edit a configuration file, you probably aren't into computers enough to know that you would even want to perform these tasks at home without hiring someone to do it for you.

I definitely disagree with this. When I'm not writing software I do photography and I set up a studio at home Studio Nelson - .warning: nudity (. . . that always gets them in) and photographers come over, often with a their laptops and often exchange image files or they want to try printing an image on some archival-ink printer I have or whatever. These people know what a TIFF file is, but that's about as technical as many of them get in computers, even though they know a LOT about photography

(BTW, Nikon's latest DSLR supports built-in 802.11xx WiFi, so pretty soon the laptop won't even be needed.)

Very intelligent, educated people often know a lot of highly technical stuff in their field but it falls off rapidly outside it. The company I work for makes medical products and our customers are usually specialists, such as cardiologists. WRT computers they know what a DICOM file is, and not much more.

So the idea that nontechnical people don't need to transfer files between computers simply isn't true in this modern world of multiple OSes, and multiple computer-like appliances.

I did not write that non-technical people do not want to transfer files. I wrote that a person such as a 70 year old woman who is someone's mother in law is very, very unlikely to have any understanding of computer technology, and will never configure a network or set up a unix box with a windows box to do file sharing.

And even in your example, none of those people were trying to configure a computer network. They were just wanting to use an already existing one that was user friendly... which doesn't have anything to do with the point I made.

Therefore, I think having configuration files in the example you gave is perfectly reasonable and not some sort of short-coming in Linux. If, once configured, the average user had to edit all kinds of text files, compile programs, and install and run particular background services in order to even get on such a file share once it was configured and made available by the administrator, then you might have a point.