I don't know about your desktop, but Gnome in Fedora 12 is not 100% stable for me. Imagine if some of those utilities were running as root ... <<shudder>>
(To be fair, I love Gnome and am glad to be using it ... still, it's a big and difficult software suite; MUCH better if work as root is done using the more tested and stable non-GUI userland stuff).
IMHO.
Hugh
Message: 17 Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:41:51 -0400 From: Tom Horsleyhorsley1953@gmail.com Subject: Re: Root with GUI To:users@lists.fedoraproject.org Message-ID:20100415124151.04ec7c7b@tomh.ccur.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:42:46 +0800 Ed Greshko wrote:
At some point, they'd logout and later, next day...after lunch, login as themselves and now have all sorts of troubles they didn't have before.
"It is possible for idiots to screw up", is not the same as an actual case history of some exploit hitting someone only because they were running a GUI app as root. I'm still waiting for the pointer to those case histories:-).