I think that Trisquel inherits the default from Ubuntu, in which there's no root password (Direct root login is disabled) and instead there's an user which can execute programs as root (Including a shell) using sudo. You can set up a root password anytime, it doesn't has deep security implications. As you probably already know, root exist in any GNU/Linux system and it can't be removed[1]. I *suppose* that Ubuntu does this so that the users use sudo for each root command instead of opening a root shell in order to reduce the changes of accidentally executing commands and root and break the system that way.

[1]: You can remove the line from /etc/passwd, but that will break the system. Also, “init” will still be launched as PID 0, so it has root permissions even if there's no user named “root”.

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