Linux as difficult to use

An article on opensource.com brought a comic on The Oatmeal to my attention, comparing how users are expected to deal with problems in different operating systems.
Coincidentally yesterday evening, I had to fix a problem on a Windows 7 Lenovo laptop where the preinstalled Microsoft Office 2010 Starter refused to work with a bizarre error message (“Click2Run Configuration Failure”). While there is no official workaround from Microsoft, the fix documented by Steve Schardein implies three reboots.
What I consider interesting about these images of the typical user of Windows, Mac, and Linux, is not so much how they are determined by technical qualities of the OS, but how they imply socially constructed ways of dealing with technology:

• rebooting as a kind of magic reinitialization of a machine
• the expert at the Apple store as an authority deciding about the fate of a machine
• the solitary tinker completely loosing his reference to time and space

These attitudes do not exist in isolation, and are no longer exclusively tied to one OS, but in our imagination we still like to think about the typical user in that way. Technology is always used in a social context, and users learn to deal with problems in that context. That's why discussions about what OS one should recommend to one's grandmother seem limited to me when they concentrate on technical merits of the OS and its UI, but need to deal with how users learn to make use of resources in there context when they encounter problems. And these resources are not limited to functionality and documents that are part of the OS, but equally important are social relations to other users online and offline.