Re: Windowz convert wants to know why he should not be root???

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 02/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 20:38:28 +0100

Perfect Reign wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 02:16:41 GMT, someone posing as David Carter donned
> fireproof bloomers and chiseled in the wall:
>
>> Howdy NG,
>>
>> I keep reading hints that my default mode of operation should not be
>> logging in a root.
>>
>> If I'm the only one I want to be able to use my machine, and I built it
>> (time and time again :-), why should I be a normal user?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David Carter
>
> Throwing myt $.02 in here as a fellow Windows user...
>
> ..one of the things I hate about Windows is the all or nothing design. You
> either are Administrator or you are a user (power/normal).
>
> In Linux you can run as normal user yet still type in a root password any
> time you want to do something that requires root permissions, such as YOU
> or installing an RPM with YaST. You can then go about your business
> confident that you're not mucking things up for the entire system.
>
> I WISH Windows had this ability.
>
> There was a thing I was researching while doing W2K conversions for the
> county where we could use AD to manage installs for normal users while
> having the windows installer files pushed out to the workstations and run
> as administrator. (We were switching from a self-managed install paradigm
> on 8,000+ Win95 boxes to the same number of W2K and XP boxes with reduced
> permissions.)
>
> In any case, during the past six months or so that I've been running SuSE
> 9.1 and 9.2 at home, I've never logged in as root. I find there is almost
> no need to. I did login once as root to install a newer version of
> OpenOffice than came with my (then) Mandrake 10.0 CD, but that screwed
> things up, so I decided against ever doing that again.
>
> Hope that helps!
>

The problem with Windows in User/power user mode is that a lot of software
won't work (E.g. Norton Live Update, Mercedes Parts catalogue, Map and
Guide), they assume they can do what they want and if you work in a company
with a security policy, it causes no end of headaches!

Dave

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