root has less menus

[Matthew Kuiken]

ubuntu at rio.vg wrote:
> Are you guys saying that gnome is so insecure that merely executing it
> as root is a major risk?!
>
> Wow...
>
> Just... wow...
>
> I'm glad I use KDE...

Let's just say there is a text editor with a bug that trashes one 
directory every 10,000 folders that are browsed through while opening a 
file.  This would happen so infrequently as to be an almost impossible 
to find bug.

If you are running that editor as a user, and the editor hits the bug, 
maybe it gets a subdirectory of your home directory, and you lose some 
data.  More likely it hits a directory you do not have write access to, 
and the damage doesn't occur.

Run the same program as root.  The bug hits, and it is guaranteed data 
loss.  If it hits the root directory, bye-bye system.

This is a pretty extreme example, but it should illustrate why you 
shouldn't run anything more than necessary as root.  Even a run of the 
mill ordinary bug can become a _really_ big problem when it is run as root.

-Matt