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▲ ragequittah 3 hours ago

Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.

▲prmoustache 2 hours ago | parent [-]

To be honest this matter more on graphene than on linux or windows because of the sandboxing of all apps by default.

On Linux and Windows it doesn't make a huge difference to be admin or not on a single user system. If you have a process on windows running with your user rights it can access all your data, which means game over already. Same on Linux if you aren't using heavily sandboxed flatpaks or do not run all your apps inside jails using tools like landrun or firejail.

▲ragequittah an hour ago | parent [-]

There's a reason why enterprises don't give you an admin account on Windows. Sure damage can still be done, but the blast radius is highly reduced. It was like the first rule I learned about Linux back in the day: don't ever log in as root, don't even bother enabling it. Hell it's not even a good idea to do it on an offline computer cuz you might accidentally bork something yourself. The barrier of at least a password to install system level software or delete critical files is a good one to have.

▲prmoustache 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

It only limits the blast radius on multiusers systems or when people do not follow basic security measures like having a different password on each computer. I agree it is a good one to avoid breaking the system yourself too easily but that is only if you don't blindly copy paste commands with sudo.

The only thing it mitigates really is how easy a malware can hide in the system once already present. But as said earlier once running under your username it is game over, your data is right here ready to be stolen, compromised, altered, destroyed or encrypted.