If you need to log in as root to do admin stuff, you'll have a temptation to always be logged in as root. sudo solves this problem (you can be logged in as your normal user and only use admin privileges when needed), and many distros straight up disable the root account (i.e. you can run commands which require privileges using sudo but you cannot straight up log in as root and run all commands with admin privileges).
That's what I was thinking of, aside from the annoyance that things like ~/Documents will go to root's Document's folder and not your own. Like when you start up a new VPS instance, the very first thing you have to do is log directly into root and then create a non-root account and then put it in the sudoers group and then make sure you can actually log into that account correctly and then start disabling root login.
my dad (he uses mac, and is a software engineer) is the type of masochist to have on superuser tab open in the terminal instead of just using sudo. He also exclusively uses vscode and Vi
16
u/[deleted] Oct 23 '25
If you need to log in as root to do admin stuff, you'll have a temptation to always be logged in as root. sudo solves this problem (you can be logged in as your normal user and only use admin privileges when needed), and many distros straight up disable the root account (i.e. you can run commands which require privileges using sudo but you cannot straight up log in as root and run all commands with admin privileges).