My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers. I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary. Grub takes very long to load with “welcome to grub” message. I just wanted a stable distro as arch broke and currupted my external ssd

  • Nia [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    2 years ago

    Pretty sure most people just use sudo for everything if they aren’t a sysadmin, I use sudo and almost never touch su unless I’m recovering from a major screwup

    • tal@lemmy.today
      2·
      2 years ago

      You also have sudo -s, which is similar to su.

      Some distros set up sudo by default, and some don’t. I started out on Red Hat, back in the 1990s, and I don’t believe that they set up sudo by default; the norm there, at least at the time, was to su. Ubuntu, as I recall, installs sudo and I believe configures it to grant sudo access to the user account who did the installation. There, the convention is to kinda sudo. I can’t recall whether the default is passwordless, though.

      I don’t think that using either is a horrendously bad practice. I tend to set up sudo in password-requiring mode and use sudo these days, but I wouldn’t blink an eye at using su either.

      I think that the most-significant security concern with su is that you can leave a root shell lying around if you walk away from your computer, and while sudo may reduce the frequency with which that happens – if one is prone to walking away from their computer and leaving it unlocked in the first place – you can do that with sudo -s as well, which I certainly use, so…shrugs Plus, if you have sudo set up with passwordless root access, any shell is functionally a root shell anyway. And, frankly, if someone has physical access to a system, most people don’t bother to lock down their system against setting init=/bin/sh on the kernel command line in GRUB, passwording their BIOS and restricting it from booting from alternate boot media, etc, so…

    • freddy@lemmy.world
      22·
      2 years ago

      I am not a sysadmin, jus user since 2000. I think if you ever need to do something with sudo it will be as dangerous as using su.