Does it work too if the account opened on the Mac is a non-admin account? I'm a Linux person but my gf has a Mac. It became so slow an unusable after the years

Does it work too if the account opened on the Mac is a non-admin account? I'm a Linux person but my gf has a Mac. It became so slow an unusable after the years that I re-installed everything and created her a non-admin account to surf the Web and, months later, things seems pretty ok for her. I'm wondering if such a quick attack by plugging an USB device works too on an unprivileged account?