zlacker

Shit gets complicated, and being able to dynamite a railroad track through a mountain of nuance is just easier.

"Oh, that path is actually not a temp directory and requires permissions different than the user account?" - sudo

"Oh your firewall blocks my outgoing telemetry data?" - sudo

"Oh your firewall blocks my localhost request but I don't actually realize that's what happens but when I try it with sudo it just works everywhere?" - sudo

There are myriad reasons apps want root access, and almost none of them are good reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not simpler for them to get sudo from a user than it is to get dev eyes addressing (let alone understanding) the nuance.

>>IggleS+(OP)
Why the hell does telemetry need to allow inbound connections?! Running as root for that reason is even more offensive than what I had figured.

I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes here... is there some cult of people who love installing apps with root privileges?

>>noduer+Es
I think the downvotes might be because I specifically said outbound connections? Although if you have IoT devices it's not unreasonable that they should be able to initiate conversations with your other devices (that would then need permission to accept inbound connections from your IoT devices).

Or maybe the downvotes are because everything I was saying was conjecture / hypothetical anyway, and you're now asking a more specific question to the general question being answered.

I thought the question was "why do apps that don't need sudo request sudo?" And my answer was "perhaps because it's easier to fix permissions problems by getting permission for everything than it is to get them by understanding why your app is getting blocked by them in the first place." Whether it's inbound or outbound or taking video surreptitiously doesn't really answer the question of "why, if the app doesn't actually need it?"

At any rate, I don't actually know why because I don't ask for permissions that I don't need. I also don't know why you're getting downvotes as I didn't downvote you: this answer, like my previous one, is speculative, as is somewhat inevitable when trying to answer "why" questions that relate to the motivations of others.

>>IggleS+ml1
For the record, I thought your original answer was excellently well constructed. The bulldozer analogy is completely recognizable to anyone who's tried to engineer any software that needed to run a local server and somehow get its data out. Geez why didn't we all think of forcing the user to run it as root? /s

Maybe more interestingly: I do think that the motivations of others are totally calculable. Society is an autocomplete. One big honkin LLM replete with all the hallucinations. Pretending to be a member of this society is to pretend that I wish to better understand why I'd be downvoted for a thought - to pretend that it's just me, a neuron, looking for back propagation. Yay for the neuron.

Nevermind, it's not important anyway. (Life).