Well, that was only in reference to someone moving away from Ubuntu. I
have advocated to my local school system, government and city council to
move to Ubuntu. But for those who cant or wont move to linux, win xp pro
is what I keep them them. Mainly because I spent so much time securing
my own systems that I can lock one down pretty well.

This is what I just did for a sheriffs department: Took 35 machines and
upgraded from NT4 to XP Pro and 5 on Ubuntu. I turn off all the services
that you dont need on XP. Disabled IE and Outlook. Turn off Auto
updates. I use three pieces of security software. I used to use
ZoneAlarm but I have found Comodo and its nice. I use Ad-ware from
Lavasoft and AGV. For the police I use the paid versions to get extra
features. I use a old pc as a firewall for the whole network. The Ubuntu
machines I just set up and run. Nothing much I have to do to them. I do
use firestarter on those but these are so freakin secure - for the
average users.

I hear of lots of people having bad things happen to their computer but
I have been lucky to never have that happen to me. I keep my spyware
and viruses definitions up to date and I keep watch on my system.
Staying away from IE is a important issue as well. Since I have taken
over the computers at a local school where they let kids play online
games after school hours, they have not had a single problem with their
computers. Im not a genius when it comes to computers - I just stick to
the basics, keep it simple, and use my head on what software is bad for
the system and then lock it all down.

But back to your original point, Ubuntu is very user friendly for the
most part and I always push that out first. My parents cant use it as
easy as Windows just for the fact that, if there is a problem its just
about impossible for me to talk them through fixing it. With windows,
everything is point and click.