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this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Windows is historically a "single user OS" whereas Linux is historically a multi-user OS. They're both multi-user now but the philosophy of these backgrounds results in what you see today.
So under Windows you login "as an admin" and don't need passwords for many things - similar to (but very much not the same as) running Linux as root.
Under Linux you login "as a user" and need to elevate permissions for things which can affect other users on the same system. Typically with sudo these days.
These lines are very much blurring so you can do many things under Linux without a password and some things on Windows require "running powershell as an admin".
NT (and therefore all Windows versions today) always had multi-user security. It's essentially a ported version of DEC Alpha.
On install, the first user is admin, just like the first Linux account is root, or else you wouldn't be able configure the machine.
Windows architecture built on DOS (3.x, 95,etc) lacked any such security, and was developed as a single-user OS (goes back to DOS86).
Yeah, and NT was pretty much just a corporate and government thing throughout the 90s. It wasn't until XP that home users got it on the desktop, and even then, the first user created automatically had all admin rights, because people were still used to the Win9x/DOS way of doing things. Separation of different accounts with different privilege levels wasn't a widespread practice up until maybe Windows Vista.