Hey, if you have the energy and availability to support that, congrats. I have tried to support family members and friends, and frankly, it drove me crazy. Even for OS-independent (or OS irrelevant) items, I found myself tearing my hair out. I barely have enough time to take care of my own PC. That is one of the big objections I have to non-OSX or Windows OS's on a consumer PC: the support just is not there. With a Windows PC, I can at least tell my mom to go to Geek Squad to get a new hard drive installed. With a non-Windows PC, I am suddenly the on-call support person.

I am really the last person who needs to be sold on non-Microsoft or Apple OS's. I use FreeBSD a lot, and push for it at work wherever it is appropriate.

But X is a mess to install (although as you point out, it is fine once it is up and running), and I really do not think that giving someone a setup that only you can support for them does them (or yourself!) any favors.

J.Ja