On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 12:02:27PM -0700, Michael Toomim wrote:
I don't buy it. Most desktop computers (dos, win95/98, early macs) don't even have a "root" concept, and all users have root-equivalent power -- yet I've *never* met a person who deleted their system files because they had root access. (I've been admin for a lot of systems.) This just isn't a problem that comes it in practice.
You forgot the corporate usage, where IT staff is wanting to limit what the users can do, and have them not mess with the box, or isntall unauthorized softwares (think games and such). In these cases it is important to have them not run as root. Also i think being root allows you to do more things even to other boxes on your network that a user would be able to, altough i am not very familiar with that kind of things.
Huh? This option doesn't prevent you from gaining root privelidges. If you have the root password, you can still log in as root at the console or su to root in a shell. You can even log in as root to the console, kill gdm, and then run startx as root to bring up gnome as root. All this option does is keep you from logging it as root *at gdm*, which is a really pointless feature IMHO.
