On Monday 03 October 2005 09:00 am, Dave Gutteridge wrote: > > You should never login to GUI as root. Never as in not ever. > > Okay. Out of curiosity, why not? > Two Schools of thought: #1 By logging in to do a few tasks as root, you open numerous programs as root you do not need to. This creates a security problem - programs running with root privileges for no reason. #2 Windows admins log in as administrator all the time, and somehow keep their machines malware free (well, some do), and certain types of network equipment has a gui - and no user OTHER than root or admin! I've always thought its best to use your judgment. Small tasks - use the commandline, without a doubt. If you have 80 things to do, unjack from the network and login as root. If the machine is running in production and you are afraid of the consequences....wait, why do you need to change 80 things on a production machine?? :-P Some modern versions of Debian will *not* let you login as root at the login screen, or run a program as root easily (have to use the kdesu or sudo facilities). I think this is overkill. Some level of judgement should be allowed on the part of the operator.