h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't want to draw you into a distro war Happy, just looking for a little information. I'm intrigued by your comment about the root account in Ubuntu and interested to know how it's different to other Linux distros. Perhaps if we talk about it here, amongst outselves and with no-one else listening in who might say 'But here's why I like distro X instead', it'll be just that - one explaining something to another

First you need to know is something about me, I did not come to Linux from windows but from BSD so I'm sort of used to old style *nix. I switched Linux because I got fed up of the absolute pain of getting Linux games to run on BSD's under Linux emulation and the pain in the rear with hardware support (specifically 3D graphic cards).

Most *nix systems (including most other Linux distros) allow you to log into the root account like any other user - not that it is ever recommended, the only time I've ever done that is when installing stuff with non user friendly installers (e.g Slackware & NetBSD) and only to create a normal user to which I immediately switch.

Now Ubuntu has a nice installer so you do not need the above and anything you want change at the system wide scale of things you can do using 'sudo', but that is also the problem. The more normal *nix command to do something as another user (including root) is 'su', su'ing root in Ubuntu does not work as there is no proper root account. This can be a problem for newbies as many Linux/*nix tutorial use su, not a problem if you know to use sudo instead ... but how many newbies are going to know that?

That said the Ubuntu approach has it's advantages in that you don't get newbies who don't know any better not creating any user accounts and doing everything as root (don't laugh, remember if your not a geek and you have only used windows you have most likely never come across the principles of user privileges and security).

That said my reasons for switching my Linux recommendation for newbies from Ubuntu to Mepis had very little to do with the root thing and more to do with the fact that;

1: Mepis uses KDE which I think is a little easier for most windows users that Gnome (I still point people coming from a mac background to Ubuntu for similar reasons). I know there is Kubuntu but Mepis dose it so much better which is odd as both are based on Ubuntu.

2: In Mepis it is so much easier to install the stuff that has restrictive licenses such as drivers for 3D Graphics cards, Java, Flash etc (it's an option on the KDE settings dialogue).

I suppose I should add my own reason for not using Ubuntu - NO ROOT

I'm a geek, I will download the latest pre alpha testing only version of my favourite bit of software and when as occasionally happens it all goes to it nice to be able to unplug the PC from the net and log into root and to have the chance of fixing things - but I admit that probably don't apply to most newbies...