Gufx firewall sufficiency

[papakota]

Hello!
I'm pretty new to the world of Linux. Right now I use Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 Later down the road I plan to install LAMP to try to run a web server.
Generally speaking, I prefer GUI (as most people, I guess), though I have no problem with CLI (remember myself in 1990 with MS-DOS).
As a regular user I don't think I really need a firewall in Ubuntu. Sticking to installation defaults is fine by me. But as an admin of a web server, I would think that I'm gonna need something beyond the Desktop ed. defaults security-wise. I'm aware of IPtables, of course. But to me it seems a little bit too much to learn, too steep of a learning curve right now. Then there's ufw.
And a GUI front-end of it, which is Gufw. Here opinions vary. Some say, I must learn IPtables, others think that Gufw does its job fine.
So what I'm asking here is not just an OPINION, but also a reasoning behind it. Real life example maybe etc.
Thank you.

 

[MrColin]

I think a good strategy must involve a firewall in addition to a reactive component such as fail2ban and portsentry. The iptables is awesome in its flexibility to sort and mangle packets based on user created rules. However once those rules are set, that is all they do.
On desktop you can have conky scripts streaming gorgeous log digests to see what is coming and going from your box. There are other ways to view logs of course and I think gufw shows some log output. If you're really focused on the lamp stuff, do that and run gufw. If you want to learn about fire-walling and things, use iptables.