Craig White: > I don't recall Les ever sounding in on whether he logs into the GUI > desktop as root - perhaps he does but I think not. I wouldn't know about > Tim. If he means me, hardly ever. About the only time I will is if a normal user couldn't log on - found that was due to not having sticky bits set on the /tmp directory after moving drives around, or immediately after installing a new system. > It strikes me as a lazy habit and once someone has settled in to this > habit, they will not give it up easily. I tend to agree, they also paint themselves into a corner. If *your* files are owned by root, you have to log on as root to access them. For a while, now, the only thing I've needed to do as root is "yum update", every now and then. Which I do through "su -" in my CLI. Occasionally, it'll be a "yum install", or a reconfiguration of DNS records or the Apache server. But I can't think of any applications I use as root other than a text editor, for the purposes I just mentioned in the last sentence, and serviceconf. > It's clear that the reason that Windows sets the normal user account to > superuser privileges because they want to appeal to the non-technical > users who simply want to turn on a computer and start using it right > away. That, and there's just too much crap that won't work as a limited user. > The penalty for that is that this user must run firewalls that ask > questions the user doesn't understand, employ anti-virus software that > this user probably won't verify is being updated and hopefully It gets me that things like you mention will let ordinary users configure them. Ordinary users shouldn't be able to change firewall rules, but they often can. -- (Currently running FC4, also trying FC5.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
