As a Fedora person I do prefer the way Fedora handles the root account as opposed to the "locked by default" approach that Ubuntu takes, but I think he's arguing against a straw man here.<p>The point of locking the root account in Ubuntu is not to protect the user from damaging their system with commands: it's just to not have an account with a potentially weak password and a known username that can be brute forced or abused in other ways. Not everyone that installs Linux knows the full implications of the root account, and given that it's a very, very, minor inconvenience to the user who wants that account enabled, that sounds like a fine trade off to me.<p>I also feel like the author greatly exaggerates the inconvenienced caused by this to the sys admin. Instead of `su -` and typing the root password, is it so hard to type `sudo -s` instead?<p>Also if there are multiple users on a server that may need root, using `sudo` makes it so you don't have to remember to rotate the root password every time a person who used to have root access leaves the company or switches teams or something. For setups with hundreds or thousands of machines, sudo is a much more scalable approach IMHO.