Are newbies running a firewall?

[Chris Maaskant]

I've been using kubuntu 7.04 for a few weeks now after been using debian
etch for a while, and one of the first things i noticed was that no
firewall is running after a default install.
I thought this to be strange for a newbie friendly (i'm no newbie) distro.

Anyway, i installed firestarter and it ran fine, but it won't startup as the
system boots.
This is a known
bug:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firestarter/+bug/42759

It seems that this problem exists since ubuntu edgy.
OK so i tryed guarddog (wich i don't like) and it woudn't run at all!

Because the firestarter problem has to do with networkmanager i decided to
remove networkmanager because it is useless to me anyway because i only
have a cable connection.
After that firestarter works fine.

But that made me wonder, since kubuntu seems to aim towards newbies, how
many of them are running kubuntu without a firewall?
Even if a newbie decides to install firestarter it would appear to be
running fine until after a reboot, how many would notice?

I don't now if these problems also occur in ubuntu, but it would be strange
if it didn't cause it's not kde related.

So are newbies running a firewall,and how insecure is this?

Chris Maaskant.