FWIW, the few non-techie people in my life that I care enough to administer their notebooks and provide support all run KDE on Debian happily.

While I had some reservations about acceptance when I made the switch from Windows 7, it turned out that it was one of my better choices of my life, and resulted in much less work for me compared to what Windows caused for me previously. And GNOME just did not work out well for most of these people and the workflows they are used to.