On Mon, 2020-06-08 at 11:40 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote: > Many years ago I used to always login as root because it was > "easier". But then I realized it was unnecessary, somewhat > hazardous, and tended to cause weird issues if I wasn't careful or > even if I was. When I first explored Linux, I did that a bit. But SOON discovered it was RARELY necessary, and it often painted you into a corner. You ended up making things root-owned that shouldn't be, then you needed to be root to do ordinary things, because of that. People fall into the same trap with SELinux, stupidly disabling it, then having to keep it that way, because their files are mislabelled, and they keep trying to do thing that they shouldn't do (e.g. have webservers read and write outside of safe filepaths). So much of the computer's configuration is user-oriented, i.e. you configure things for your logon, not the computer. Each user is different. Generally speaking, the root user didn't configure things for all users, they configured things for the root user. So, again, there was little point in being root. There's a few things you set up once, printers, network, time, but then you don't do anything more with them once you've got them going. But the one thing that really gets me is: What the hell are people doing with their computers that they need to be constantly administering it? You should be able to set it up and then just use it. I do a "sudo yum update" every few days, and that's usually it. I used to fix some computers for local schools. The users were always messing them up. But once you de-authorised users from doing things they shouldn't be able to do, and locked things down with (what's now default) sensible security settings, all that went away. Semi-weekly fixups of crap dropped down to being just semi-annual decluttering of unneeded old work files filling up drive space. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1127.10.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Jun 3 14:28:03 UTC 2020 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
