Ubuntu an Alternative to Linspire?

[Jeff Waugh]

<quote who="Ed Sutherland">

> I'm a Linspire 5.0 user but am looking for a bit more flexibility. I'm
> looking at Ubuntu because it is debian-based, includes more recent
> versions of my favorite applications, and does have wide support both from
> the user community and a commercial entity.

Cool!

> But (and you know one of those just had to appear) I don't want to give up
> the positive aspects of Linspire: zero configuration, perfect hardware
> detection and Windows support (I'm able to access my XP partition and use
> my Windows truetype fonts.)
> 
> Am I asking for too much, or can Ubuntu provide me more freedom but not at
> the expense of desktop user friendliness? (I hope the answer is yes.
> After weeks in Linux, going back to XP is a jarring experience.)

I think you'll be pretty pleased with Ubuntu. "Just Works" operation, along
with awesome hardware support and detection are major goals for Ubuntu. Our
first release received a lot of praise for our success with these goals, and
our next release, coming out on April 6th is going to be even better. :-)

The two features you've mentioned are available -> Ubuntu supports read only
access to Windows XP NTFS partitions, and you can easily install your True
Type fonts.

Also, Ubuntu is significantly more secure than Linspire. So much so that our
security policy is almost completely reversed! With Linspire, all of your
software runs as root, which means it has full access to everything on your
machine, hardware and all. This is particularly dangerous for software that
communicates over the Internet - for example, if your instant messaging
client has a security hole, everything on your machine is exposed! Very
scary. With Ubuntu, you have a regular user login, and we actually disable
the root account. Only particular users are allowed to run software as root
or perform administrative tasks. This is much safer, and still very easy to
use.

Thanks,

- Jeff

-- 
gnome.conf.au 2005: April 19th            http://live.gnome.org/Canberra2005
 
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