And while I do recognize that using sudo for everything is superstitious, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth putting in the effort to educate users not to do it. It’s not that hard to understand what sudo does and when it should and shouldn’t be used. It’s a problem of ignorance, not a fundamental lack of ability to understand these things.

Besides, superstition is a bad thing. At best it causes additional inefficiencies and at worst it can cause demonstrable harm. I won’t dismiss anything as “mere” superstition, because superstition itself is worth fighting against.

And yes, it is probably easier just to get away from teh stupid than try to fight it head-on. The year that everyone is a Unix command-line master is the same year that everyone in the US gets their income taxes done by the end of February, with plenty of time left before the deadline. Fastidiousness and precision are not in many people’s nature, or are focused in specific areas. Many people would not drive a beat-up car like yours, for instance, even if it does make installing ham radio antennas easier.

It’s a shame, because I think that if most office workers understood how to program and what exactly the computer can do for them, their jobs would become immensely easier and less repetitious.

Still, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of having non-root access, which we all recognize as being a major problem from a security standpoint.
But who I am to talk? I’m currently logged into XP under the default “Administrator” account. Windows makes it too much work to be anything but an admin on my own computer.

One of the shortest paths available to consummate frustration is to fight human nature. I’d suggest you investigate other paths, if frustration is your goal. Many offer better scenery than this one.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t think most people can really appreciate the intricacies of even the relatively rudimentary privilege separation in Unix without much time devoted and a certain degree of fastidiousness that most people do not even desire to be capable of. When working with corporate clients’ systems, for instance, I often find them littered with install packages, ignorant of good package management, with security skewed towards non-existent threats while ignoring real ones, and, worst of all, willful ignorance of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard in favor of internal “standards.” And these are “Certified UNIX Administrators,” as I am reminded in their email signatures.

Learning how to think in Unix can be very demanding for the average user. I think that a little knowledge can be much more dangerous in Unix than in Windows because of the lack of special-casing and safety nets; one “sudo rm -rf /” and this guy’s toast. This isn’t a criticism of Unix, incidentally. I think that lightweight users who just want IM and email will thrive on Ubuntu as soon as they’re shown the package manager, and I think dedicated Unix-heads are also in good shape. It’s the dabbling “power-users” who are most prone to blowing things up as they mess around with tools they don’t fully understand. The learning curve for someone raised on Windows is much higher because they’ll try to understand the tools in a Windows context.