Michal R. Hoffmann wrote:
Jaap Haitsma wrote:Blame my ignorance but what's the bad thing of starting an x application under the root account? It works fine in other distros I used to use.this is the same reason as you shouldn't work as root. In GUI is much easier to mess up the system (oh, ie drag&drop /etc into trash comes to mind). And you can get used to work as root in GUI. So better is su or sudo things you need than work as root all the time.
In addition, when you log in as root to X, you're starting more daemons and processes (artsd maybe, screensavers, etc) that are now running with root privs, which means if any of those processes have vulnerabilities that a Black Hat should penetrate, he's penetrated your box with root privs instead of with normal user privs.
It's also this "run as administrator" mentality that has caused a goodly portion (most?) of the virus/trojans/worms issues in the Windows world. Let's not bring that mentality to *nix, please.
Having said that, there are times that running X apps as root makes sense; just be aware of the issues.
-- Kent