Please Just Kill Yourself Now.

February 29, 2012 at 11:59 pm PT

So here’s a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace “my kids” with “sales people on the road” if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.

– Linus Torvalds’s rant on Google+ about his negative experience with openSUSE on his MacBook Air, after his daughter was was asked for a root password in order to print from the machine

Tagged with: Google Plus, Linus Torvalds, opensuse, passwords, security

comments so far. Add yours.

http://www.facebook.com/po.prostu.kuba Kuba Kontek

That’s what happens when you replace MacOS with a Linux. It’s just Linux, what else could you expect?
Anonymous

While I personally agree with you and think your comment funny, please don’t start a flame war over Linux vs. Mac OS X.

I cannot really believe that sb needs root privileges for such tasks. On the other hand, I do not think Mr. Torvalds can be mistaken about Linux stuff. So, somebody using Suse Linux who can shed some light?
Anonymous

To be fair, we’re talking about Linus Torvalds here. I’d imagine that his expectations are pretty high for the OS he helped create.
Andreas Jaeger

With printers attached e.g. via USB that the system knows about, it should setup them without root password. If the system doesn’t know about the printer and needs to add additional drivers or a PPD file needs to be installed – and PPD files can execute shell code – then indeed a root password is needed, otherwise the system can be compromised by any user.

For more details see also http://lists.opensuse.org/open.....01470.html

Andreas Jaeger – openSUSE and SUSE
Tony Camilli

“to access some wireless network”

The irony here is that every time I’ve tried to use Linux on a day-to-day basis, I’ve needed sudo with root password to connect to wireless because Linux connection managers are so flakey.
Anonymous

An absolutely wondrous response to the insanity of technology!!
http://profiles.google.com/nadeem.khan.asm Nadeem Khan

Now will have to try SUSE to check this out. but coming from ” The Man Himself” it can’t be wrong

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Please Just Kill Yourself Now.

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