I’ve been rambling for awhile now to anyone who’ll listen – including some friends who work for Dell – that Linux, in particular things like Ubuntu, will start to give Windows a run for its money pretty soon. This article reminds me that there’s still some ways to go before just anyone can ditch Windows, but as a depction of the average user’s reaction to the latest incarnation of desktop Linux, it’s pretty encouraging.

The guy over at Content Consumer (who incidentally is less impressed than I am by the ease of Linux) got his girlfriend to go through 12 basic tasks — from setting the desktop picture to watching a YouTube video to downloading an album through Bittorrent — with no help at all. Just sit down in front of Ubuntu and do it.

Now, her experience isn’t perfect, but it’s hard to see things working this well for a non-techie on Linux just 5 or 10 years ago. The most surprising thing to me is that the biggest fail came on the system’s inability to gracefully handle upgrading the Firefox installation with the Flash plugin. Other than that, she was able to get quite a few things going on the first try. The main problems really seemed to be in the interface cues, which are very hard to get right even when you have a massive budget for such things, which I imagine the Ubuntu people do not.

What I’d like to see now is another post in which he gets her to set up a variety of popular accessories through Ubuntu. How good is it at recognizing the ancient HP InkJet you still haven’t replaced? Does it like your digital camera? How about your Flip? The non-techies probably grind more of their molars away on getting new peripherals to work than they do on any other common, vital task on Windows. How well does Ubuntu handle these compatibility issues?