You haven’t had to do that in years. The newer Linux distros are all stable and remarkably easy to use for your average “point and click” user.
I’m doing a web kiosk based on Fedora 12.10 Beta 2 right now. They even fixed Unity so it doesn’t suck quite so bad as it did during it’s debut.
Compared to Win 8 and Mountain Lion? Pure OS gold...
Typed Fedora... Meant Ubuntu. Also working on a Fedora 17 project for a student lab. That’s working good too...