John Hasler wrote:
Sven Arvidsson writes:I'm not a Windows user myself, but I hear of many Windows users who actually know that they shouldn't run as admin but are forced to do so because a lot of applications, installers and games simply will not run on an unprivileged account.Nothing forces them to run those applications. If they really cared about security they would refuse to buy such programs and the publishers would get the message.
Yes, there's certainly a lot of bad programming about, but that's not because it has to work on Windows. It's just stupidity. It would be perfectly possible to configure a Linux application to drop its log files into /bin. But how do you tell the MD that he can't use his favourite accounting package? None of this stuff says on the box that it needs admin permissions, and of course it doesn't really. It's just next to impossible to find out where it does need write permissions and there isn't really the time to do it the hard way. As for games... Having said that, it's clearly not a bright idea to put a log file ofpotentially unlimited size in /root. Hasn't anyone heard of /var/log? And it's pretty obvious why a separate partition is useful there, even
for a standalone workstation.