Beagle

[Michael Wiktowy]

On 1/19/07, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > possibly know. What is known is that the default environment for root is
> > decidedly different than for users and that is why it is not recommended
> > to run GUI as root.
>
> This raises a little question in my mind. How does running a
> network-config GUI or a package manager GUI (GUIs which ask for the root
> password) compare with running some other GUI as root?

AFAIK, the aversion is not against running GUI apps as root but rather
running the entire X server + desktop support infrastructure as root.
The rule of thumb is, if you don't need to run something as root, you
shouldn't. Sometimes you need to but that is more rare than you'd
think.

While it may be a minor inconvenience at times, the various tools and
temporary privilege-escalation mechanisms available make it fairly
painless to run your desktop as a regular user. Compare this to
Windows where you can't even run some *games* outside of the
Administrator environment! This one little axiom of the *nix world
saves you a whole mountain of anti-virus/anti-spyware pain ... the
main reason I personally gave up on Windows for doing any serious work
on.

/Mike