See Told ya Linux Sux
More Rant
I wouldn't consider myself a computer noob at all. In fact there are only a few people who could call me such a name that might make me accept the title. (Bill G, Scoble and Linus Torvald - Yeah I hate Linux but he's still brilliant.) My problem is that Linux requires so much fiddling around with the settings and adding this and that just to make it work that it becomes unusable in a practical environment for your average everyday user.
Some might say that my argument is a phallacy and that Windows is just as hard or even harder to use. Well I've got a phallus for you that begs to reqpond to that question. Windows has very good documentation if you bother to read it. It is fairly simple if you decide to read a little. The makers of the different Linux distros don't have any way to make a decent set of docs so they are doomed to fail.
Linux is harder to use than Windows. Period. The average user can't sit in front of a Linux machine and produce the same kind of work as they would with a Windows Machine. Has anyone ever tried to explain to a noob how to install software on a Linux machine? It's great for an experienced user/developer that wants to be able to tweak the heck out of a machine but for Joe Schmo it's crap so that makes it useless to me as an admin and a developer.