How come Windows and macOS users don't have to enter their password every time they need administrator privileges?
How come Windows and macOS users don't have to enter their password every time they need administrator privileges?
Isn't it enough to just enter your password once to login, then receive a warning whenever you're about to do something potentially dangerous?
If it's such a big security risk, how come the most popular and widely used operating systems in the world and their users seem to be unaffected by it?
I guarantee, most new users coming to Linux from Windows/macOS are going to laugh and look at you funny if you try to justify entering your password again and again and again.
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Windows is historically a "single user OS" whereas Linux is historically a multi-user OS. They're both multi-user now but the philosophy of these backgrounds results in what you see today.
So under Windows you login "as an admin" and don't need passwords for many things - similar to (but very much not the same as) running Linux as root.
Under Linux you login "as a user" and need to elevate permissions for things which can affect other users on the same system. Typically with sudo these days.
These lines are very much blurring so you can do many things under Linux without a password and some things on Windows require "running powershell as an admin".
NT (and therefore all Windows versions today) always had multi-user security. It's essentially a ported version of DEC Alpha.
On install, the first user is admin, just like the first Linux account is root, or else you wouldn't be able configure the machine.
Windows architecture built on DOS (3.x, 95,etc) lacked any such security, and was developed as a single-user OS (goes back to DOS86).
Yeah, and NT was pretty much just a corporate and government thing throughout the 90s. It wasn't until XP that home users got it on the desktop, and even then, the first user created automatically had all admin rights, because people were still used to the Win9x/DOS way of doing things. Separation of different accounts with different privilege levels wasn't a widespread practice up until maybe Windows Vista.
NT (and therefore all Windows versions today) always had multi-user security. It’s essentially a ported version of DEC Alpha.
- DEC Alpha is a hardware not a software.
- I know that WinNT had multi-user capabilities, but I've simplified for conversation.