> That gets to the philosophy of what sudo is used for in the first place. Back when sudo was experiencing a big upswing in popularity, it was a way to avoid having a root shell open at all. Forcing the user to type sudo before every command reminds them they're acting as root.
I do not think that is accurate. As I remember it, sudo gained popularity because it provided better control over access to the "root password" for teams of administrative staff. sudo was lightyears easier and provided much more fine-grained control than figuring out how to design POXIX groups.
1) A mechanism to provide better control over access to root privileges where administrative access must be shared between multiple users.
2) An auditing mechanism to record both operations completed as the root user, as well as failed attempts to perform operations as root (usually authentication failures).
3) A way to remind the user that commands are running as root, as well as a way to avoid accidentally running commands as root, since you're never (without "sudo -i" or "sudo -s" or similar) at an actual root shell.
If you're using "sudo -i"/"sudo -s" all the time, you don't lose anything for #1, and losing #3 is mostly just an inconvenience (it's an extra layer of protection, but it's not even really foolproof even with sudo). Losing #2 (auditing) can be a big deal, though, because, if everything's happening at a root shell (rather than via the sudo command), you lose the audit log that traces what's being done at root. Gaps like that in audit logs should be an indicator that something bad might've happened, but you can't make that assumption if you're routinely doing it yourself, too.
I do not think that is accurate. As I remember it, sudo gained popularity because it provided better control over access to the "root password" for teams of administrative staff. sudo was lightyears easier and provided much more fine-grained control than figuring out how to design POXIX groups.