this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
33 points (83.7% liked)

Linux

48187 readers
1467 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers. I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary. Grub takes very long to load with "welcome to grub" message. I just wanted a stable distro as arch broke and currupted my external ssd

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You also have sudo -s, which is similar to su.

Some distros set up sudo by 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 to su. Ubuntu, as I recall, installs sudo and I believe configures it to grant sudo access to the user account who did the installation. There, the convention is to kinda sudo. 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 sudo these days, but I wouldn't blink an eye at using su either.

I think that the most-significant security concern with su is that you can leave a root shell lying around if you walk away from your computer, and while sudo may 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 with sudo -s as well, which I certainly use, so...shrugs Plus, if you have sudo set 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 setting init=/bin/sh on the kernel command line in GRUB, passwording their BIOS and restricting it from booting from alternate boot media, etc, so...