The newest build (5.0.4) is very nice. It has a nice layout, it's stable and they take security into account.

Things like:

* Allowing you to SU to a root terminal only. They have you setup the box in a way that encourages you to stay logged in as a normal user. It will even bitch at you if you attempt an IRC connection as root.

* They now have an update service that works very much like RedHat Linux. A little icon flashes when your updates are ready. It's really nothing more than synaptic that alerts you when updates are ready. Nice and clean.

* It's certainly a desktop OS yet you can add packages to do development and server stuff.

* It's stable as all hell.

* Easy to use installer. This is especially nice.

* The packages are not more than 1 or 2 releases behind on things like NMAP, etc. You can of course compile your own.

An NMAP scan out of the box shows a very tight default config. Impressive for such a new release. You can easily turn on tons of stuff but out of the box, the host is streamlined.

* One CD install. Compare that to some other distros.

Anyway, I use UBUNTU all day long for simple networking tasks. NMAP scans, SMB messages, Evolution (instead of awful Outlook), etc.

I give it 2 thumbs up.

--TH13