I was a NetBSD desktop on an IBM X31 for 5 years, in part making the statement the TCO was about 1/5th of the windows and mac equivalents. I did incur costs of (inter)operation, non-financial costs of time and effort, but it worked. I drove it hard enough to get two IBM replacement keyboards. the underlying machine still works.

its an easy sell if your peer set is in terminal sessions. its a hard sell if your peer set is in other peoples window product.

I was mostly getting abuse from fvwm users, over my choice to use tvtwm.