There are absolutely no problems with using a non-admin user account. Just better isolation, better security and a few inconveniences. Using a standard user ac

There are absolutely no problems with using a non-admin user account. Just better isolation, better security and a few inconveniences. Using a standard user account was one of the things I started with on OS X after being used to the "user must be administrator" paradigm that's deeply entrenched in the Windows world for a very long time. Before Windows Vista came up with some way of UAC (User Access Control), being an administrator user on a Windows system was the least painful way to use the system. This style is still propagated even today in several companies with the latest versions of Windows. The philosophy about being a non-admin user also ties into the UNIX-ness of OS X, and in all * NIX systems the recommendation is always to use a standard account and switch to a superuser/root account only when needed within a specific terminal for a specific task and exit out as soon as that work is done. When people on * NIX joke about "rm -rf /", there are people who remember the wounds of such experiences from real life when running as root (fortunately, I didn't have to learn from experience). :) The "annoyances" for a standard user on OS X are that installing applications into /Applications or unlocking panels in System Preferences (if it has been configured to be that way) needs administrator credentials. And it's also required if one fancies getting into system (or protected) directories and wants to move/delete/rename/add files. On the terminal, when needed, I switch from the standard user to the administrator account and then use sudo. It is indeed a little more cumbersome than providing sudo privileges to the standard user account, but it's not often that I need this and I don't find this inconvenience as a big waste of time. On a lighter note, using a * NIX system as an administrator user all the time seems dirty, just like using a Windows system as a non-admin user does. :P P.S.: Couldn't figure out a way to escape and type an asterisk followed by a non-whitespace character for the * NIX references.