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So this is wrong? "So they decided to create their own desktop environment, one that retains the same look and feel of a GNOME 2 (or MATE) desktop, but built atop GNOME 3 technologies. That was how Cinnamon came to be."

Many of the posts so far direct the original poster to dedicated firewall appliances or distributions. If I read the summary correctly, the OP is simply looking for a good GUI to manipulate the firewall rules built into the kernel of all modern Linux distributions.

I can't vouch for any of them, but GUI frontends include guardog, lokkit, firestarter, and probably others. They are all in various states of development and maintenance.

Part of what the user wants to do (firewall per app) wasn't possible in the past with iptables (per-gid blocking was easy), but I believe it's now possible. A primitive daemon, called Leopard Flower, seems to offer this functionality: http://leopardflower.sourcefor...

From what I can see, the most promising, integrated, easy-to-use firewalling GUI software going forward is Fedora's firewalld and it's accompanying GUI. I know firewalld is available on Ubuntu (and its command-line interface). I'm not sure about the GUI part. Perhaps someone familiar wit Ubuntu can comment. Here's an article on installing it in Mint, so I assume it's similar in Ubuntu: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2013...

From what I can see, firewalld and firewall-config hit the sweet spot for most desktop users. I'd never use it on my router, but for a desktop, it works pretty well and is under active development. I imagine it will sport per-application feature soon, if it doesn't already.

(Ubuntu, which never ever mentions the word Linux on its websites and webpages)

482 of the Top500 supercomputers run Linux, and China’s Tianhe-2 is the fastest
http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2013/11/18/482-of-the-top500-supercomputers-run-linux-and-chinas-tianhe-2-is-the-fastest/

Enjoy!

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2013/07/08/fedora-19-review-schrodingers-cat/2/

Based on the pictures of GNOME 3 on that page of that Fedora 19 review, it looks like GNOME 3's GUI is still fat. It looks pretty much exactly the same as it looked a long time ago... ugly and with tons of wasted screen space. I still see that "title bar and extra padding" you mentioned that's supposedly been fixed.

GNOME 3 is a disaster. Hell, KDE4 was too for that matter, but I'm pretty sure after this much time of it being officially released, it was well on its path to becoming a very decent environment and showing promising results. They both fucked up. Only it seems the GNOME project fucked up worse, and they're still struggling to get people to use their desktop. No surprise; it seems they're still dumbing it down, as I noticed in the latest Fedora GNOME 3 *hides* the Log Out option by default... until you install another window manager or desktop environment and reboot. And as usual, no way of "correcting" this behavior without messing with registry values. What the fuck?

The problem is these fucking idiots in charge who want to be 100% in control of everything, never taking any outside input or criticism, and telling everyone who doesn't like the direction they're going to fuck off. It's ironic that, since inception, they said the GNOME 2 desktop was going away and that the "fallback mode" was only intended to be used if 3D hardware/drivers are not available. They continuously said that they were not going to provide a "desktop" environment; either use GNOME 3 as we want to force it down your throat or get the hell out of here. Hell, when it was announced that GNOME 3 fallback mode was being deprecated, they stood by their words: they were not going to bring a traditional environment back. It wasn't until at least *weeks* later, and then they announce GNOME Classic mode. WTF?

Too little, too late. After Unity, MATE, Cinnamon, Consort and who knows what else spawned using GTK+ (typically using "traditional" GUI elements), the GNOME project tries to "win back" users. Just for the way they act alone (read: ASSHOLES) they don't even deserve any users. If they would get someone besides the hard-headed, artistic, creative, marketing type idiot running their project, then maybe it wouldn't be getting run into the ground.

Wouldn't the Netbook UI look pretty much identical to their desktop, just like Windows does? Or do they change things quite a bit?

Netbook screens are too small to show all the detail and small icons that a full-size desktop screen can. Here's a review of the latest Fedora with KDE, showing some screenshots of the netbook UI (on page 3). Of course, these shots aren't quite right because it looks like they took them on a standard desktop screen instead a real netbook (or least a simulation of one), but you'll get the idea. It looks quite different from the traditional desktop UI (they have screenshots of this too if you're not familiar with the latest KDE releases).

This is actually quite a good idea, but it should be named differently so that it's clear that it's a completely different interface, something like OS-X vs iOS.

Why? It can run on the exact same OS (or even a different one; KDE isn't limited to Linux), it's just a different "skin". I'm pretty sure there's actually more significant differences between iOS and OS X than just the UI.

The Gnome guys could have done well w/ this.

Except that this is absolutely contrary to their fundamental philosophy, which is to dumb down everything as much as possible. They think that having different UIs on different devices is "too confusing" for users, and that you need to have the exact same interface everywhere.

Wouldn't the Netbook UI look pretty much identical to their desktop, just like Windows does? Or do they change things quite a bit?

Netbook screens are too small to show all the detail and small icons that a full-size desktop screen can. Here's a review of the latest Fedora with KDE, showing some screenshots of the netbook UI (on page 3). Of course, these shots aren't quite right because it looks like they took them on a standard desktop screen instead a real netbook (or least a simulation of one), but you'll get the idea. It looks quite different from the traditional desktop UI (they have screenshots of this too if you're not familiar with the latest KDE releases).

This is actually quite a good idea, but it should be named differently so that it's clear that it's a completely different interface, something like OS-X vs iOS.

Why? It can run on the exact same OS (or even a different one; KDE isn't limited to Linux), it's just a different "skin". I'm pretty sure there's actually more significant differences between iOS and OS X than just the UI.

The Gnome guys could have done well w/ this.

Except that this is absolutely contrary to their fundamental philosophy, which is to dumb down everything as much as possible. They think that having different UIs on different devices is "too confusing" for users, and that you need to have the exact same interface everywhere.

Whole disk encryption needs to become mainstream. There are many approaches. Here are a few useful links.

If you want your OS to encrypt everything, Fedora makes it easy. So does Ubuntu.

If you want an add-on software package, PGP works well. In a slightly more involved way, so does Truecrypt.

If you prefer a hardware solution, you can adapt regular, off-the shelf drives with an encryptor such as the Deskcrypt. Fully-encrypted hard drives are available from most vendors, too, but the ones I've found most generally useful (as in, "compatible with every other sort of hardware") are the Eclypt models from Stonewood.

I have owned and used all the products above and like them very much. If you feel different, feel free to Google things like "Momentus FDE" or "WinMagic" or "Guardian Edge Hard Drive" for other vendors and approaches. Take whatever path seems most reasonable and logical to you.

But for God's sake, would everyone please start encrypting your drives? That's not everything you need to do. It's just a minimal first step toward personal security. But it's a start.

I much prefer the diskGenie, which is also a product from istorage-uk.com, however it feels more rugged, has a very nice tactile feel. Has the same encryption level as most of the others and reqires a 6-16digit pin to access the data.I have the 500gb 256 version and a 128gb ssd both reasonably priced.

Whole disk encryption needs to become mainstream. There are many approaches. Here are a few useful links.

If you want your OS to encrypt everything, Fedora makes it easy. So does Ubuntu.

If you want an add-on software package, PGP works well. In a slightly more involved way, so does Truecrypt.

If you prefer a hardware solution, you can adapt regular, off-the shelf drives with an encryptor such as the Deskcrypt. Fully-encrypted hard drives are available from most vendors, too, but the ones I've found most generally useful (as in, "compatible with every other sort of hardware") are the Eclypt models from Stonewood.

I have owned and used all the products above and like them very much. If you feel different, feel free to Google things like "Momentus FDE" or "WinMagic" or "Guardian Edge Hard Drive" for other vendors and approaches. Take whatever path seems most reasonable and logical to you.

But for God's sake, would everyone please start encrypting your drives? That's not everything you need to do. It's just a minimal first step toward personal security. But it's a start.