this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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You also have
sudo -s, which is similar tosu.Some distros set up
sudoby default, and some don't. I started out on Red Hat, back in the 1990s, and I don't believe that they set up sudo by default; the norm there, at least at the time, was tosu. Ubuntu, as I recall, installssudoand I believe configures it to grant sudo access to the user account who did the installation. There, the convention is to kindasudo. I can't recall whether the default is passwordless, though.I don't think that using either is a horrendously bad practice. I tend to set up sudo in password-requiring mode and use
sudothese days, but I wouldn't blink an eye at usingsueither.I think that the most-significant security concern with
suis that you can leave a root shell lying around if you walk away from your computer, and whilesudomay reduce the frequency with which that happens -- if one is prone to walking away from their computer and leaving it unlocked in the first place -- you can do that withsudo -sas well, which I certainly use, so...shrugs Plus, if you havesudoset up with passwordless root access, any shell is functionally a root shell anyway. And, frankly, if someone has physical access to a system, most people don't bother to lock down their system against settinginit=/bin/shon the kernel command line in GRUB, passwording their BIOS and restricting it from booting from alternate boot media, etc, so...I am not a sysadmin, jus user since 2000. I think if you ever need to do something with sudo it will be as dangerous as using su.