this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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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
You also have
sudo -s, which is similar tosu.Some distros set up
sudoby 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 tosu. Ubuntu, as I recall, installssudoand I believe configures it to grant sudo access to the user account who did the installation. There, the convention is to kindasudo. 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
sudothese days, but I wouldn't blink an eye at usingsueither.I think that the most-significant security concern with
suis that you can leave a root shell lying around if you walk away from your computer, and whilesudomay 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 withsudo -sas well, which I certainly use, so...shrugs Plus, if you havesudoset 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 settinginit=/bin/shon the kernel command line in GRUB, passwording their BIOS and restricting it from booting from alternate boot media, etc, so...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.