LXer: Tutorial: Best Practices with sudo on Linux
 

Published at LXer:

Ubuntu's use of sudo to simplify Linux administration is ingenious, but barely scratches the surface of what sudo can do. Follow along as Yvo Van Doorn of Likewise Software unlocks the powers of sudo.

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Better yet on a desktop don't use it at all.

Ubuntu's use of sudo is ingenious? Excuse me, but Ubuntu's use of sudo is completely idiotic. They totally bastardized the idea behind sudo by making all commands available to the "administrator". If this isn't good old-fashioned Windows think, I don't know what is.

su -c <command> does essentially the same thing (execute a command/series of commands as root), but it prompts for the root password.