Unfortunately if you give non-technical users root you are also giving root to the phishing site or fraudster that cons them into giving it root. It's hard for

Unfortunately if you give non-technical users root you are also giving root to the phishing site or fraudster that cons them into giving it root. It's hard for technical people to get their heads around just what a hostile environment the modern scam and hustler riddled slop and spam infested Internet is. Using the net as a non-technical user is like walking around a dodgy high crime area of some third world city at night as an unarmed sixteen year old girl there on holiday. Tech folks get so good at ignoring and skipping all that nonsense that they stop noticing it. I get three or four phishing or scam attempts a week, some of which look convincing if you don't know how to examine an e-mail domain or a URL. It's a hellscape. An exercise for readers who don't believe me: get on a Windows machine and try to use regular web search to find and download a piece of software outside the App Store. Pretend you are non-technical and just looking for something to get something done. Be sure you do this from a VM you can delete after it becomes compromised, assuming you can actually get to a download at all behind all the popups and scam "your PC is infected!" sites.