Originally Posted by
buzzingrobot
Teapot and tempest.
Fedora, etc., allow ordinary users to be added to the wheel group. The sudoers file can, optionally, be edited to allow a user in the wheel group to, for example, do a "sudo command" without being prompted for a password.
By default, Ubuntu does not have a wheel group. (It doesn't prevent the creation of one.) So, I can't execute "sudo command" without a password prompt, because I need to be in the wheel group to enable that.
If someone wants to use the more traditional approach to acquiring root privileges in Ubuntu, and they know how, they can easily do that.
In Fedora, I can do "su -", for example, enter a password, and become root. I can't in Ubuntu. The root user exists, though.
In Fedora, I can do "sudo -i" and escalate my privileges to root for as long as I wish. Ditto in Ubuntu.
In Ubuntu, do a "sudo whoami" and see what it says.
As for the Windows Adminstrator comparision, it's been more than 10 years since I used Windows. But, I do recall that some versions of Windows tried to generate a false sense of security by prompting for a password to do almost any little thing. The easiest way to avoid this annoyance was to simply run as a Windows Administrator. Unix/Linux uses an entirely different design. If a Linux user is frequently asked to acquire root privileges trying to accomplish routine tasks, then, more than likely, that user is doing something very wrong.
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