To add something to the advices above against running in god-mode all the time (which are wise, and you should really take into account), I will only add one thing: if you are seriously doing su or sudo 30 times per session, then you definitely are doing everything wrong. Once your system is set up, you shouldn't need to use administrator privileges unless you need to reconfigure some system core settings or unless you need to update or install something.

You should really revise your policies, stop and think a moment. Make a list of the things you are using root for, and then stop once again and explain why do you think you need root for each particular task.

Otherwise, completely ignore the advice of every *nix user, and suffer the consequences. But if you are going to do so, I'd rather be running a less restrictive OS, like Windows. You'll be happier.

If you do that, your system will be as secure as Windozzz.

Its normal to have to use (su) often on a new installation, once everything will be configure you won't need to be root often anymore.

I pretty much always have a root terminal open (and an unprivileged user terminal open). Looking back through root's command history this is for

• Running backups
• Mounting file systems not in fstab
• Running commands in /sbin
• Looking in some system info directories not otherwise readable
• Searching directories not otherwise searchable
• Changing system configuration files
• Creating partitions and file systems
• Installing software
• Daemon control

When I first came back to *n*x I tried to adopt the new paradigm of using sudo for everything but got so frustrated at the extra keystrokes required for so little benefit. Perhaps if I was part of a sysadmin team administering a server farm it would be a good discipline but for a personal workstation with regular tested backups ... the risk-reduction/benefit ratio just didn't make sense; anyway, I figure I can screw things up just as much running commands via sudo as directly.