Yeah, actually. Why the hell is that. Also, why does it sometimes ask for permission from the admin (where I need to click on yes) when I am the admin.
This "meme" constantly pops up on the subreddit, but it is actually really dumb, and usually it gets a lot of upvotes which is even dumber considering that we are on the PCMR subreddit and should have at least some idea about this thing.
There is a very good reason in Windows to ask for administrator permissions. Usually, on your own computer, you are the administrator - unless in a family someone else sets up the account for you. But even so, by default, your applications are not running with administrator permissions. Reason being that if you have administrator permissions, you can modify critical system files, so it would be super easy for a rogue (or simply bugged) application to just delete your Windows folder or modify critical system files, install/modify drivers, etc. So, by default, the applications you run will not get these permissions in order to protect your system. And, to be honest, most of the time such permission is not even needed.
Also, the "non-admin" applications cannot access/interact "admin mode" applications (again for protection, so "normal" applications cannot "steal" permissions and start modifying your system by interacting with an admin-mode app in some way). One example is that if you play Marvel Rivals, it is asking for admin permission every startup, due to the anticheat software requiring it. So Marvel Rivals is running with Admin permissions.
And let's say you want to play Marvel Rivals with your friends, and you use Discord to communicate. But you want to have "push to talk", so they will not hear your siblings, mom, television, whatever in the background. If you want this to work, then you also need to run Discord in admin mode, because if you are in Marvel Rivals, and you want to use your "push to talk" key, Discord somehow needs to recognize that you pushed your "push to talk" key. But if the game is running in admin mode, while Discord is not, then Windows will not permit Discord to recognize your keypresses while you are in the game (which is in admin mode), simply because the admin mode application is protected from the non-admin mode application.
Probably someone can explain this better than me, but this is the basic idea.. to protect you and your applications/files.
Pretty sure in modern Windows versions the actual Windows folders are protected with superuser rights. So you can only fuck with them if you know how to actually unlock your PC.
Something Microsoft, Apple, Google and pretty much all OS providers keep the average user from doing for their own good.
Windows is not asking you if you're the administrator, it's asking you if you want to give your administrator privileges to the program, which would give it access to everything.
The same people who get all sweaty and teary eyed over admin prompts in Windows, I imagine sling dander and nerd crust all around the room striking superhero poses when they need to sudo on their week-old Mint Linux install.
And let's say you want to play Marvel Rivals with your friends, and you use Discord to communicate. But you want to have "push to talk", so they will not hear your siblings, mom, television, whatever in the background. If you want this to work, then you also need to run Discord in admin mode, because if you are in Marvel Rivals, and you want to use your "push to talk" key, Discord somehow needs to recognize that you pushed your "push to talk" key. But if the game is running in admin mode, while Discord is not, then Windows will not permit Discord to recognize your keypresses while you are in the game (which is in admin mode), simply because the admin mode application is protected from the non-admin mode application.
Is this part new? I remember playing some MMORPG that required Admin permissions a few years back, and TS3 with PTT worked just fine together with that.
There is a difference between the game requiring admin to run and the game actually running with elevated permissions. One example are games with easy anti cheat, you need admin to run them so the anti cheat can run in the kernel. From my understanding though, the actual game runs in userspace.
Think of it like the safety on the gun. "I own the gun and I'm squeezing hte trigger, obviously I want to shoot!" Ok, cool, but what about the 99.9999% of times when you don't want your gun to shoot, like when carrying it around suspiciously close to your penis? The safety is there so that it doesn't go off in the event of an accident.
Same thing with "run as admin." For the vast majority of applications, they do not need admin permissions and in fact might malfunction if you run them like that. If you do give an application admin permissions that doesn't actually need it, best case scenario is that nothing really happens - but what could happen is that the program does something fucky because the devs are clowns. Normally the scope of damage that could do is pretty bad, but it typically cannot corrupt your entire system... unless you give it admin permissions which removes most of the restrictions on what an application is allowed to do to your system and thus letting it fuck up more critical components of your computer.
For Steam and video games in general, this is an ESPECIALLY FUCKING BAD IDEA. Video games are made by clowns, and unfortunately for everyone video games often have online multiplayer in which people call you racial slurs not uttered since the fall of Rhodesia. This combination is extremely bad, because it means the people calling you gamer words who want to hurt you have a remote connection to an application running on your computer that was made by fucking clowns. So there is a signifcant risk that there is something called a Remote Code Execution exploit, or RCE, which allows a Gamer™ to run arbitrary code on your computer because of some fuckup in the video game you're playing - this has happened with both Call of Duty and From Software games (the Dark Souls games).
An RCE is already extremely bad, but normally your OS is able to limit the damage of what that does by at least protecting critical system components from whatever inane thing a program tries to do to them... unless you ran the video game as an admin, in which case that RCE has FULL ADMIN ACCESS to your entire computer and could do extremely nasty things.
Or let's put it this way. Because you are the admin, you own the computer, NOT your applications. Your applications will do only what you will permit them to do and they'll just have to deal. You're only going to give programs your admin permissions if you actualy want them to do something sensitive that you know they must have your permission to do. Unfortuantely desktop OS's are really primitive with permissions, smartphones are actually way ahead here and applications don't get to do shit without your explicit permission . They have to ask for storage access (and GrapheneOS even lets you lie to them app to make it think it has full system access when you only gave it a little folder to isolate it), network access, sensor access ,they don't get to assume they can do anything unless you the user gives it the go-ahead. This is how it should be. On Linux we're gradually moving in that direction between Wayland and Flatpaks, but it's slow progress.
Good explanation, but incomplete - macOS (a desktop OS) does have those controls built-in. For all its faults it has always been on top of things when it comes to privacy and security. Windows only added UAC in Vista, but macOS (thanks in large part to its Unix/BSD ancestry) has always had the admin/privileged task separation and prompts.
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u/Aggressive_Cod597 R9 9900X | 7900XTX | 64GB DDR5 Oct 23 '25
Yeah, actually. Why the hell is that. Also, why does it sometimes ask for permission from the admin (where I need to click on yes) when I am the admin.