newbie serena wrote: ⤴Fri Feb 09, 2018 10:57 pmLinuxMint is less safe than Windows for newbies, because LinuxMint does NOT warn during or after install that one has to create a standard user account.
Windows DOES warn. And Windows DOES offer a menu to create a standard user account.
Another thought...
I am
not speaking to Windows 10, nor Windows 8.x, but classically it was the case in the WinNT environment (which, to clarify, is what
all releases of Windows were from XP onwards) that a lot of software was not written with the Admin / Normal User security model in mind, and if the software didn't essentially have unrestricted access, it would break. Classically, from Windows XP onward, the default account created at installation time
was an Administrator account. These two facts are the reason in the Windows world why one had to create a separate non-admin account, and no matter how the process might have been sugar-coated, that the user had to do this.
For the longest time, software no matter how installed would not behave properly without Admin privileges. I don't mean this was the case with literally every single last possible piece of software, but it was frequently the case nonetheless.
Also,
serena, and for your benefit because I'm assuming you wouldn't know this,
all versions of Windows come out of an era where originally there was no such distinction; in fact, generally there was no such thing as the concept of user accounts in the first place. In the Windows world, Windows NT on corporate workstations, and then later Windows 95 for "normal" users, implemented user accounts. However, "user accounts" in non-NT versions of Windows were pretty trivial and absolutely meaningless where security was concerned.
Prior to Windows NT and Windows 95, there was no such thing as a user account in Microsoft-produced operating system products. Windows 1 - 3.11 offered no such thing. You turned the computer on and it booted up and took you to a desktop. The same was true of every version of MS-DOS which ever existed. The same was
also true of pretty much every single other operating system with the exception of the several different iterations of UNIX which existed since the 1960s.
The
original purpose behind user accounts was to allow multiple people to access a central computer (i.e. distributed dumb terminals connected to a mainframe) because there had to be a way of differentiating between user input. This was done not so much for security reasons as it was because computers were excruciatingly expensive, and one could much more easily justify the cost of a computer if multiple people could use it. It made it even easier to justify the expense if multiple people could use it at the same time, and then again further justified the expense if multiple people could use it from different locations.
AT&T's UNIX, Berkley's BSD, and others became the basis of inspiration for Linus Torvalds to write the Linux Kernel, and for Richard Stallman and the other members of the GNU Hurd to write the GNU (
Gnu's
Not
Unix) Toolkit. That is to say, everyone involved in the foundational conception, development, and execution of what we now refer to as GNU+Linux was working off the basic playbook started by the UNIX community. One of these foundational underpinnings is the separate
root account. As a GNU+Linux distribution, LinuxMint is absolutely no different than the dozens or more of other distributions which do or which have ever existed.
The reason it may
seem that a "normal account" is an administration account is you're using a normal account which is included in the list of which accounts have access to superuser do, which is more commonly known as "sudo".
Some distributions by default give no other account sudo access, and instead require you log in as root to do administrative tasks.
No one hurt fortunately. So new car needed, maybe insurance will not pay out? Even if they do he will have lost his good, safe driver discount.
