I ended up switching to openSuSE because she was having a difficult time remembering how to connect to our network shares and I didn't have the spare time to sort out what it took to get Active Directory membership working. After the switch, though, we never went back. This was 4 or 5 years ago, and she's now my ex- (unrelated to software choices), but for what she used it for -- e-mail, basic document creation, YouTube (Flash at the time), music organization (I believe we used SongBird? ... whatever it was, she was happy with it), and (at the time) a SageTV client. Aside from having to learn what did what, where (which was pretty minimal, she was already using OpenOffice on Windows, and Firefox was Firefox, SageTV was SageTV, most things were familiar), it was great. She figured out, on her own, how to customize the background and some of the other user settings.

And I had fun from time to time connecting via SSH and making a song or two play when I knew she had to be cheered up. She thought that was a little creepy, but hey.