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Making Puppy not run as root would shut up a huge amount of the forum questions.
Ignorance of noobs [bless them] is not a reason.
These are not newbies. Apart from people who want multi-user for the sort of reasons Nathan wants it, these are mostly tin-foil hat people who have been indoctrinated by other distributions
For me, the system files are not of great concern, because I have the setup cd. It's the lost user files, I'm more concerned about.
That is a most important point
Does having Puppy run mainly as root make the developers' lives easier? Because that's the only thing I can think of to justify it. It's at best neutral for security, gives a negligible improvement in convenience, and makes it harder to have a multi-user system.
I would separate this into two issues, and these are my guesses at the answers:
1. Why does Puppy run as root by default?
- The average computer user that Puppy was targetted at wants to be able to just do things (e.g. install new software) without having to log on as an administrator or put a password into 47 dialogues or something. (Are the Vista people listening?) Puppy was intended to be convenient, and a lot of users used to come from Win98, where they didn't have passwords or multiple users or things stopping them from being in control of their own computer. Incidentally, a lot of businesses around here (the ones that have some trust in their employees) still set their computers up as much like the Win98 way of doing things.
- I look at it this way -
not running as root gives a negligible improvement in security and is thoroughly inconvenient.
2. Why is Puppy a single user system (i.e. why is it not easy to run it as a multi-user system)?
- tradition - it has always been this way, and no one has changed it. I guess it has always been this way because it is believed that the target audience does not need a multi-user system, and it makes it easy for the developers
If someone made Puppy multi-user friendly I would support them, but hopefully Puppy will always run as root by default.