Right now, the most likely successful migrations to Ubuntu happen for *nix experts and total novices who have someone install Ubuntu for them, but the most likely people to try Ubuntu are Windows power users--those who like a lot of configuration options but who are also used to using the GUI for tweaking options and not manually editing a text configuration file.

The most popular requests for editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file involve changing the default boot option (to Windows instead of Ubuntu) and changing the timeout before a boot option is selected. The other less popular ones would be just bonus features, I guess.

Right now, the boot menu has regular Ubuntu, recovery mode, and memtest. With just a simple Down arrow, someone can accidentally boot into recovery mode.

Perhaps we should make recovery mode a little less obvious. Is there some way to make a special key combination or something to access recovery mode? Mac OS X has you hold down Cmd-S during bootup to boot into single-user mode. I'm not sure if Grub can do this, but it'd be cool if it could.

The reasoning behind this is more user-friendliness. Users who aren't comfortable at the command prompt might accidentally end up there and not know what to do.

The added benefit is that those who need the illusion of better security would also stop complaining that the existence of recovery mode is a security problem.