People's reaction to this is just stupid. [LWN.net]

People's reaction to this is just stupid.

Posted Nov 19, 2009 14:50 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: People's reaction to this is just stupid. by drag
Parent article: Fedora 12 lets unprivileged users install packages

Yes... Now that I think about it you should have a admin 'role' or group
that a user must belong to in order to have the default set of mundane
desktop administrative tasks.

Things like 'mount removable media', 'reboot', 'update software' and a few
other things.

Then let the initial account created during installation belong to this
role. Then users that get added later it should be a manual task to add
these 'mundane privileges' through adding them through a role.

Then the first time that a user performs a mundane privilege then it should
prompt them to if they want to make a 'desktop admin' password or not.

Something like that.

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admin role/group

Posted Nov 19, 2009 18:13 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Minus the last paragraph, you just discovered Ubuntu's model. Which is
derived from the older "wheel" model someone else mentioned.

admin role/group

Posted Nov 19, 2009 19:41 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ubuntu's model is to give unfettered access to root if you are able to supply the user's password. Which is exactly the sort of thing I want distros to avoid completely.

It's acceptable in a single user environment, which is typical, but it's completely counter productive for most other environments. You should not be required to have root access to perform mundane and routine actions.