I'm relatively new to Arch after using Mint, and I'm trying to understand the security trade-offs of account permissions. I currently have one everyday account that can use sudo, rather than logging in directly as root. Is it safe to give my normal user administrator privileges? What advantages would I get from using a completely unprivileged account for daily work and keeping a separate account for administrative tasks? I initially created two accounts, but switching users or authenticating through the other account every time I needed to install software or change system settings became inconvenient. I'm specifically asking about sudo-enabled versus regular user accounts, not about logging in as root.
3 Answers
Having your normal account in the sudo-enabled group is the standard setup on many Linux distributions and is generally reasonable. You are not running as root all the time; ordinary programs launched from your desktop still run with your normal user permissions. When you run a command through sudo, that particular command gets administrative privileges, usually after you authenticate. Think of it as temporarily borrowing a key rather than carrying the whole safe around.
A truly unprivileged daily account offers some protection against mistakes and limits the damage caused by ordinary programs that do not have a privilege-escalation vulnerability. The downside is inconvenience: system administration requires another login or an administrator authentication step. For a personal desktop, one sudo-capable account used normally is a practical balance. The important distinction is that you should not log in and work as root continuously.
The main risk is that anything you deliberately run with sudo has full control of the system. A buggy or malicious program can also be dangerous if you give it your sudo password, or if it can take advantage of an already-authenticated sudo session. That is why you should inspect commands, avoid blindly piping downloaded scripts into a shell, and use sudo only when it is actually needed. Simply belonging to the sudo group does not make every application run as root.
A separate everyday account can reduce accidental privilege use, but it is not a dramatic security boundary if you can easily switch to an administrator account and authenticate. You still need to protect that administrator password and avoid granting sudo to the regular account if the separation is meant to matter.
If the second account can use su or sudo without a meaningful barrier, it does not provide much extra security. The separation only helps when the daily account genuinely cannot elevate on its own.