812
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
812 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
57226 readers
5318 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Well if you get asked for sudo, then that's a risk.
Installing almost anything* on Windows requires the equivalent of sudo, same as Linux.
Determining if it's a normal install or adding a kernel driver wouldn't be feasible just by watching the installation. (On either OS if they are not showing terminal output)
EDIT:
My context here (which I should have been explicit about sooner) is: "ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game" (with its own installer) and doesn't know if they are also getting a free rootkit.
They are going to just click Next without changing defaults, and are not going to extract and inspect anything.
Most user software should NOT need sudo.
Typically you need "sudo" to use the package installer though, if that's where you're getting confused. But that's because most Linux package managers are built to install software to be available for all users. However once installed that does NOT mean the package always has sudo access. And the way Linux software is typically installed is just putting the executable in a certain folder, unlike Windows where you run a software's custom installer which asks for admin access and then does who knows what.
My context here (which I should have been more explicit about) is "ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game" (with its own installer) and doesn't know if they are also getting a free rootkit.
Sure when it's something you compile yourself and you have some knowledge you can ./configure it to go under your home directory and not need sudo to make install later, but a game with a script or binary you need to run is likely to ask for root on launch (Especially on Windows) and maybe asks later or has command line options for a single user install, but we can assume the user does whatever is default.
I didn't suggest that it would (although it Could if it's malicious - on Linux that would be as simple as the setuid bit. Or ...back on topic... installing a kernel driver on either OS)
You usually have the option of installing for just your user, and I think that usually doesn’t require admin permissions.
I feel like you're not sure how system software like
sshand a user's personal game software can install differently in different places, and where one needs no root access to install at all. Go see how mac does it.Macs still ask me for permissions and I have no idea what’s asking to do what.
I get it for Linux and Windows (though I don't know how MacOS does it) my context here (which I should have been more explicit about) is "ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game" (with its own installer) and doesn't know if they are also getting a free rootkit.
Sure when it's something you compile yourself and you have some knowledge you can ./configure it to go under your home directory and not need sudo to make install later, but a game with a script or binary you need to run is likely to ask for root on launch (Especially on Windows) and maybe asks later or has command line options for a single user install, but we can assume the user does whatever is default.
You couldn't be more wrong bud. Flatpaks do not require sudo, executables run from a directory (like how Steam games are run) don't require sudo either. You only need sudo if installing from the main package manager like deb, rpm, pacman or whatever your distro uses. Most games on Linux aren't installed from the main package manager though.
If it's a package for the package manager you could download the archive for it and pull it apart to see its contents, it's usually very clear when such software includes kernel drivers or kernel patchers. Most software on Linux uses the package manager to install or a script to unpack, both of which are relatively easy to explore even if the software isn't open source, haven't found too many linux apps with Binary installers, they might exist but if they do they aren't popular or common.
Since this keeps coming up, I edited the post you replied to. TLDR is that we are assuming different contexts.