Markus Huber wrote:
There is nothing wrong with that and a big advantage at a school. Windows boxes usually rot away within minutes, because everybody can install anything wherever they want, they do not need to be root/administrator to do that. And that's wrong.
Caution: there is nothing special about the root-only-writable /usr/* for compiling, installing and running stuff. I was surprised to see Opera running on the Fedora laptop my stepson uses a few months ago... he just downloaded the binaries, unpacked them in /home and ran them. Similarly he has compiled .tar.gz's in /home himself and run the executable in-place.
You can mount /home noexec I guess, but assuming that a typical Linux box is much better in the "root must install" respect is wrong.
-Andy