Yes, it's mostly useless but it's also interesting to consider sudo in the context of its history, and how computing has changed in a way that's made it less useful.<p>sudo was most useful when computing mostly occurred in shared runtime multiuser environments, as found in many research universities from the 1970s through the early 2010s. It was useful in this situation because it allowed selective granting of privileges to regular users (students, researchers, professors) to run commands otherwise only available to the superuser (sudo = "substitute [root] user do").<p>Those were the days of asking your sysadmin for root access to do something potentially dangerous to the system or disruptive to other users on the shared Unix system (i.e. running the "shutdown" command, or listening on a reserved network port). sudo allowed the sysadmin to trust specific users with certain commands they wouldn't otherwise be able to run.<p>sudo (and its GUI equivalents) was then adopted into personal computer OS's as part of the first push to secure consumer OS's against their own users corrupting them inadvertently, or via the emerging problem of computer viruses. At the time, consumer OS's (win3.x - win95, original MacOS) ran all software with administrative privileges.<p>Those OS's were replaced by enterprise equivalents that were designed with stronger access control features (windows NT, and the BSDs that became MacOSX).<p>The idea was that common tasks of the time (i.e. word processing, spreadsheets) would run as regular user accounts, and things like installing software or changing system settings would trigger a password prompt), just as happens in an enterprise or shared multiuser environment.<p>But consumer OS's basically have a single logged-in human user at a time. Thanks to the web, when computation needs to happen on a remote, shared compute machine, it happens over some form of RPC or API. Other concurrent "users" on most computers are usually system processes, not real users. How many of us login into a remote <i>shared</i> "compute" system anymore? Heck how many of us even remember doing that?<p>Mobile OS's, and increasingly desktop OSs are evolving into managed runtime environments, which by design have no facility for "root" access at all, often to the chagrin of tinkerers who miss having the ability to modify OS internals. Even server-based apps are designed to run in containers that run in managed server environments.<p>Anymore, there's hardly a good reason to design most systems and software to require root access to install or run anymore. And yes, there are exceptions to this but those are usually for legacy software, or very specialized use cases like OS development itself.