Illecors, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

I don’t know the specifics on Fedora’s installer, but normally that question is about disabling root account, not logging into a DE.

Not sure what else to elaborate here. There’s a bunch of code that is not tested to be run as root. A whole class of exploits becomes unavailable, if you stick to an unprivileged user.

Say there’s some exploit that allows some component of KDE to be used to read a file. If it’s running under an unprivileged user - it sucks. Everything in user’s homedir becomes fair game. But if it runs as root - it’s simply game over. Everything on the system is accessible. All config, all bad config, files of all applications (databases come to mind). Everything.