The Ubuntu Experiment

[Derek Broughton]

Mike McMullin wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 18:13 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> 2008/8/5 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
>> > That's still merely a matter of time, and you're naive to think
>> > otherwise.
>> > The "fixed" portions of an OS are to all purposes, unimportant.  Even
>> > on
>> > Windows you can restore those simply.  It's the user data that matters.
>> 
>> In Linux, all the user's data is in /home/user. 

Well, not really.  A great deal of mine is in /var/mail/derek.  Since I've
used MTAs and IMAP servers that prefer to put that in ~/Maildir/ and others
(of both) that prefer it in /var/mail, I've struggled over the years trying
to decide which was better, and never really been satisfied.

>> Where is it all in 
>> Windows? Can you easily backup / restore a user's data in Windows
>> without backing up and restoring the OS? For that matter, transfer it
>> to another machine?

Certainly not.  But as I said, that means more time and effort is involved,
but it's _still_ only the corruption of the user data that matters.  I
guess the point is that even if Windows had real separation of privileges
like Linux, and no users could corrupt _Windows_ by running infected
software, they could still trash their system just as royally as they do
now.  And so the oft-touted fact that a Linux virus couldn't damage the
system, only the user's personal data, is irrelevant.

>   If you have the skills, you can mount a partition in the Documents...
> etc. folder, and that has pretty much the same effect, if you have the
> skills, why MS, doesn't make this easier to do for overworked and
> underpaid MSCE's is beyond me.

Yes - my XP Virtualbox is set up that way, so that most of my user data is
actually on the linux shared folder, but I'd been using Windows for a dozen
years before I figured that out...
-- 
derek