root

Posted Feb 18, 2003 20:29 UTC (Tue) by jwharmanny (guest, #971) [Link]

When a 'normal' GNU/Linux user tries to wipe out his harddisk, nothing
really bad happens. In the worst case, all of /tmp and /home/username are
lost (but most people backup their own documents often enough to handle
that).
In Windows (even Windows XP), when a user tries to format c:, the only
thing that stops him is a warning message. That's what viruses exploit all
the time. They settle themselves in the Windows registry and startup
files, and they infiltrate all core system services.
The only solution in Windows is to use a virus scanner (works in most
cases) or fdisk the entire system. Been there, done that, and it wasn't
funny.
The Linux solution is to replace the user account which was infected with
a new, clean account. And because of the XML-based document formats, which
are text-based, you can verify most documents for viruses just using vi or
kate.
Lindows throws the user-account-safety away by defaulting to the root
account.

I think users should be able to use the root account by default, but only
if they know what risks they take. The targeted Lindows users don't know
those risks. This is yet another good Linux-feature which is abandoned
because of 'useability' (read: marketing reasons). What's next?

Posted Feb 18, 2003 20:49 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Unless things have changed, Lindows runs everything as root by default...

You're kidding.

I have to admit, to this day I'd only had vaguely negative feelings about Lindows because of the name, but with no real hard evidence for them (and thus I sort of ignored them). But if this is true-- well, shoot, what a bad idea. Throw much of the advatnage of Unix out the window. I guess they did it to make things easier, but heck, that's just a bad idea from the word go.

Now I have a real concrete reason (beyond negative feelings that come from the name) to advise anybody interested in Linux to utterly eschew Lindows and instead use another distribution.

The tradeoff is an additional few minutes necessary to learn the concept of logging in as root to install system software and updates. Well worth it, if you care at all about keeping your system running.

-Rob