Walter Reed wrote:
laziness or incompetence. This entire thread is full of a bunch of crap about baseless DESIRE but there has yet to be any real concrete reasons as to the NEED for GDM level root login. The answer is obvious - there ARE no reasons. They don't exist. All that exists is a juvenile urge to
Of course users never *need* to log into gdm as root -- you don't *need* GDM in the first place -- but it makes things easier in some cases. On the opposite end, nobody has given a convincing argument for why you *need* to keep root logins away from gdm!
This isn't a black-and-white issue about necessity; it's an issue of "good practice" being over-applied, turning into dogma, and causing unneeded usability sacrifices -- an issue of tradeoffs.
Go read my previous posts to learn why being able to log into gdm as root makes life easier, especially for newbies who need to administer their desktop machines.
ARE no reasons. They don't exist. All that exists is a juvenile urge to buck the system and rebel against what everyone in the industry knows by education or experience to be "the right thing."
You're wrong here. It is NOT the case that "everyone knows in the industry" that you shouldn't log into gdm as root. In fact, the other linux distros I've tried all let you log in as root! (Redhat, mandrake) Solaris lets you log in as root. Windows definitely lets you log in as root. And with many distros, the DEFAULT is to have a single root-equivalent account and no user account! (Lindows/lycoris, winxp, etc.) In these cases (desktop computers), "industry" has decided that the best choice is to remove the root/user separation entirely! (Note that I am *not* advocating the last approach for debian.)
Only debian has decided to keep people from logging into gdm as root -- and only GDM. As far as I know, you can still log in as root to KDM, XDM, and of course the console.
I'm not proposing anything radical here -- I'm "proposing" the status quo.