Living as root, mostly a bad idea
2024-10-23 17:56:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Living as root, imho it’s a bad idea, but many people do this, feel they need to.
Any experienced Linux sys admin will tell you, learnt the hard way, that you really only want to be root for as little time as possible. Doing everything as root is dangerous.
Same goes for software development, the example in development which is analogous, is that you don’t want to spend all your time in the debugger. Just use a debugger when you absolutely have to. If you try to live your entire development experience in the debugger, weird shit happens, you end up debugging bugs in the debugger or the UI, and that’s a total nightmare. So only get the debugger out once you have exhausted all other avenues.
Not that life is exactly like sysadmin or web development, but to the extent that there are similarities, I think in most situations a similar approach would is what’s called for. Of course it’s not obvious what the equivalent of root and debuggers are in life, and it’s likely different for everyone, but maybe it’s something like finding the appropriate tool or approach for the task at hand.
Bad idea to build a shed with sky scraper building tools. And you could come up with similar examples in all walks of life. Try not to over do it.
It’s not an exact science, sometimes you get things wrong. Sometimes people over react, sometimes groups over react too. #