Root access removed

[Chris Hewitt]

Chadley Wilson wrote:

>Hey there friends,
>
>I have been working on a desktop solution for home users, 
>I have discovered from client feed back and support that 90% of all
>calls logged are as a result of simple apps requiring root access.
>
>So I removed the need to put in passwds on some of the user PCs and they
>are happy. I know what you are going to say to that but hear me out
>first.
>End-users who are new to Linux easy irritated by passwd prompts,
>My one customer made a (I think valid ) comment: He said and I quote 
>"I should be given the option to choose whether or not I want a passwd
>protected system. Why do other people tell me what I need."
> 
>OK now in fairness to his situation I can see how this is. He is a stand
>alone box with no access to the internet from home.
>His box drives a Lexmark printer and Primax Scanner. He uses a USB
>memory stick as removable storage and a cdwriter for backup.
>
>So I did the same on my PC and guess what, there is a huge difference in
>performance. 
>Why would that be? 
> 
>
With the Redhat/Fedora model the installation requires making an 
unprivilaged user and people tend to log in with that. For things 
requiring root access then yes the root password prompt comes up. 
Annoying maybe but at least the option is given.

In the MS model, no such unprivilaged user has to be made during 
installation (I've not used XP so maybe that differs?), so people tend 
to log in as Administrator so already have the privilages. I manually 
make an unprivilaged user and log in as that but when I need 
Administrator privilages for something I simply get a message telling me 
I cannot do that. I have to log out then log in again as Administrator, 
do what I need, then log out and log in again as my unprivilaged user. 
Its not just the time in doing these log out/ins, but in setting up the 
programs that I had and getting back to the point where I was before.

I think the Redhat/Fedora model is much more user friendly. You could 
suggest to your customers that they log in as root all the time. They 
would need to accept that making a mistake could have much more 
disasterous consequences, which is why non-root access is better.

As to why there should be a performance difference, I do not know.

Regards

Chris