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A Gut Check On Gutsy Gibbon

Posted by kdawson on from the who-you-callin-windows-like dept.

jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield looked inside the pre-release of Gutsy Gibbon and found what he calls 'Windows thinking.' His article, Divining from the Entrails of Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon, notes that Ubuntu is the dominant distro, having achieved a level of success that might be leading to complacency. He opines: 'Only once or twice did I find a balance between accessibility to newcomers and a feature set for advanced users. At times, I wondered whether the popularity might be preventing Ubuntu from finishing some rough edges.'"

2 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wait for next by MMC+Monster · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not having to make choices at install time is EXACTLY the reason that ubuntu is good. After a couple of simple questions, you are up and running with a very well configured system with the best one of each type of app installed that most people want. You dont have a huge stack of apps installed that you dont need. Absolutely agree with above. The problem with earlier distributions was that at installation I had to choose which office package to install, which text editor, etc. That's fine, now that I have used Ubuntu for a couple years, but back then I kind of shrugged, made a few wrong choices, and called the distribution "unusable".

    Sensible defaults and the ability to make changes later on is much preferable.

    Now how about installing ntp by default. :-)
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  2. Re:Wait for next by init100 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Short of implementing SELinux, sudo gives me what I need for right now. I can see a day where SELinux will be more appropriate for some things, but until then...

    I think that you have misunderstood what SELinux is all about. It is not a replacement for su or sudo, it is a completely different system. It allows the vendor/administrator to explicitly specify what privileges a specific process should have in fine-grained detail. Even though e.g. the apache account has read access to every file that everyone can read, SELinux enables you to specify that the apache process should be denied access to anything beyond its configuration file, its plugins and the web tree, even if it would have access according to the ordinary permissions system.

    By restricting rights on this level of detail, a cracker exploiting a security hole in the apache process would not be able to access any file beyond those explicitly specified in the SELinux policy.