Comments by "Gilad Barlev" (@GSBarlev) on "Why Aren't Linux Distros Setting A Root Password?" video.

  1. I really enjoyed that video you did a while back on all of the other limited-scope no-login accounts that exist on a modern Linux system. Those never have passwords, and I think of root in the same vein.
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  2. I'm realizing now that Brodie is an evil genius—getting all of us to comment with whether we use root or not. With YouTube logging our IPs, that means that he now has the ability to bruteforce into a nonzero number of our systems. 🤣
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  3. Yeah. One of the big learning curves for me in switching to Arch has been that build scripts for AUR packages use the tools in the environment's paths. Since I have a habit of having conda activated by default (advice on any other OS is never to use the system Python), I'd keep having builds fail (or install correctly but be unusuable) due to confusion about which dependencies existed on the system. At one point I went as far as adding: `alias yay=conda deactivate && yay` to my .bashrc
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  4.  @johnstath9666  I mean... SteamOS, Octopi, every low-cost IOT device that runs Android... Linux has so many advantages besides security. Why gatekeep and dissuade people from using FOSS software when their device might not be visible to the outside world or even airgapped?
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  5. Djibouti had it coming. Seriously—what self-respecting nation has a capital with the same name as the country.
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  6. So Linux should never be used for single-user systems? 😕
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  7. You're thinking of su. Principle of least privilege is that a sudoer should not know the root password (because if they did they would have logged in as the root user). Remember also that sudoers can be configured to give really granular access to what an individual user can and cannot do.
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  8.  @mskiptr  Brodie's video also taught me the joys of pipx. It's great for software that doesn't need a specific version of Python.
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  9. This was such an interesting question, I looked it up, and the answer is: it depends on the distro. For some—like SUSE—the answer is "HECK NO!" For others like Arch, it's "Pls no," meaning you can find scripts to do it complete with all the reasons not to do it and the things to do instead (read: use /etc/aliases)
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  10. As long as the disk isn't encrypted, though, you can always grab a recovery image, chroot into your system, then passwd (or install and configure sudo). That's what happened to me on my first Arch install (in a VM, so I really could have just wiped and started from scratch). That was an educational day, as it was the one on which I learned that Arch base doesn't include any networking or DNS tools 😂
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