vi is a staple, its a good idea to learn how to use it as its on almost every unix like system. And the point is that its a very feature rich editor. You might be supprised by the speed you can achieve by mastering even a subset of the features vi has to offer compared to nano.

Yes for newbs nano is easier to deal with. That does not mean vi isn't useful and shouldn't be learned at least for nominal editing.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned su. Whenever you temporarily want to do something as root, run it in a su shell and then logout immediately.

Using sudo with maximum privileges is not recommended as it's easy to do things as root without the root password. To use sudo effectively, you need to effectively implement policies as to which user can do what. On the other hand, you don't need so much complexity on a single user machine.

There's a reason why Linux/UNIX restricts normal users from getting root access. Because it's a multi-user operating system and you obviously don't want non-admin users to gain write privileges to system files.

You can always configure to login as normal user without a password (using one of the desktop managers kdm or gdm), but it's still not recommended, even if you're using it as your own system. Imagine that somebody accidentally gets access to your machine - how would you like them to access your documents?