Sorry Lawrie, I can't let you get away with that!
If you have read any of my post in the past, you will know that I live in a retirement village and one of my voluntary jobs there is looking after the computers of our elderly residents.
I now have seven of those residents running Linux on their computers simply because they were having so many problems with Windows - viruses (virii?), unwanted programs installing themselves, too may applications launching at start-up and hogging memory, etc, etc.
Sure, I installed Linux on their machines for them, but they never would have been able to install Windows themselves either, so that hardly counts as needing a geek to help them out.
Some of the oldies (and I'm talking a minimum age of 75 here) are running the latest Ubuntu and others are running the latest PcLinuxOS. One actually dual-boots WindowsXP and Ubuntu!
None of them are having any problems and indeed, I have to ring them from time to time just to make sure, because the minute any one of our 100 or so members runs into problems, it's straight on the phone to me. Not one of my Linux users has rung me back since I installed their systems and I'm talking up to 12 months ago.
So, if you buy a pre-configured computer with Linux on it and take it home and plug it in, it will just work. And you CAN buy a couple of pre-configured machines. There are a couple of netbooks available and any computer you buy from Pioneer can be pre-configured with your choice of Linux.

tony
Lenovo lappie, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb HD
Ubuntu 12.04
Running BIAB under WINE