Logged into GUI as root 🤣
The 90’s was a wild time…
Specially for people coming from windows, this was normal. The appeal of mandrake and corel and suse was this kind of graphical control panel à la windows where you needed root privileges in a graphical interface.
I myself didn’t learn about sudo until years later, and su just from debian 3.0.
It was a serious issue back then. People were wandering around on the Internet with root accounts. A lot of #linux IRC channels were kicking&banning anyone with “~root” or “root” ident with educational sentence like “Do not use root account as your ordinary account, check instructions”. We don’t see the issue widespread today since distros did very good intended “dark patterns” to push users to regular user accounts. Linux (or UNIX) “root” account is true god mode. E.g. infamous “rm” as root joke (!) could even affect Windows running WSL2, so MS had to implement special workarounds.
Anyone with physical access to the computer also has full file system access and could wipe everything, even without password or technical knowledge.
It’s bad for other reasons too, like a script on a website would launch as root… And also without a password if your disk was encrypted your data is protected even if someone has physical access.
It is just generally common knowledge to not run around in God mode all day, otherwise sudo wouldn’t exist.
