Well, you shouldn't be running it as root anyway (I'm not sure why you would) -- I just installed it on this laptop (Arch Linux) to test and it works just fine

Well, you shouldn't be running it as root anyway (I'm not sure why you would) -- I just installed it on this laptop (Arch Linux) to test and it works just fine as a normal user. In addition, this would still not be an issue if 1) you were running it as a normal user and/or 2) DACs were properly set.