Let's talk about a root user.
Since the earliest days of Unix, user account with user ID 0 exists to perform administration
tasks.
And on Linux this user by default is the name root, which by the way is also the case for
most Unixes.
The root user operates in kernel space, and that makes this user special.
Nothing unlike you see in other operating systems.
And the result of this user operating in kernel space is that the root user has unlimited
access to all parts of the system.
Now when you install RHEL 10, the root user can be activated or not.
In older versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you were just prompted to set a password for
the root user.
But nowadays, for security reasons, it's considered a wise idea not to set a password for the
user and just not activate it.
If the root user is not activated, the administrative user is used for administration tasks.
And to activate the root user, you just simply have to set a password for this user.
You can do that while installing.
You can also do it later at any moment.
From a security perspective, it may be a good idea not to have an active root user at all.
Additional measures are possible to restrict root user access to a system.
Avoid root login using secure shell can be allowed or not, for instance.
And the bottom line is better avoid working as root.
Use an administrative user account instead.
And the reason is simple.
If you log in to a graphical environment, for instance, using a root account, then all
components of the graphical environment are running as root.
And that makes the risk of anything going wrong from a security perspective a lot bigger
than when you log in using an administrative user account.
The administrative user account that I've created while installing Red Hat Enterprise
Linux at the beginning of this course does have sudo privileges, but you need to enter
the sudo command to use these sudo privileges.
And from everything else, it's just an ordinary user account, and that's much more secure.