I installed Crunchbang on my mom's laptop as a dual-boot and she recognized that it was faster and better but she didn't like the interface and didn't want to bother transferring all of her stuff (her massive collection of files is extremely unorganized) so she asked that I move Vista to the top of GRUB's list.

I might introduce her to Elementary one day.

My dad heard me talking about how I wished more manufacturers made their machines available with Linux installed, and he said that the majority of users would be lost. Before then, I had assumed he had no idea what a linux was. Then, a couple of months ago, I let my dad borrow my laptop to do some internet searching, and I had Elementary on it. I logged into the guest account and handed it to him. At first, I had to just kind of point to the firefox icon, but he had it from there and was surprised at how easy it was to use. I told him to play around with it after he was done searching, and he found the Software Center (and I explained it to him as "an app store for your computer") and he looked through the other apps and some of the programs I had installed (including LibreOffice)... then he asked the critical question: "Could I use my work programs on here? Like ArcGIS and *insert other specialty CAD and Mapping programs here*"

I did my research on all of his programs and was disappointed to tell him that he wouldn't be able to, but that he should email the companies and ask them to port their software. All in all, I guess it's good that he got to see that linux is user-friendly and can do most stuff. Maybe when he retires and doesn't need those programs, I'll give him a nice laptop with Elementary installed.