Immutable OS’s like nix and fedora silverblue still have sudo, they can still rm -rf /. If they can do it and maintain security, then Android can too.

I agree both the OTA and safe way of doing superuser requests could be heavy technical work. My bigger point is people who manage ROM’s shouldn’t demonize having full control of devices we own. Root can be done safely. Its not an inherent security risk, its just a technical problem waiting for a technical solution. “Just accept you dont need it” is not an acceptable response IMO.

Good guess about the federating problem. Thats a good reminder for me to change instances (was on lemm.ee before it died, .world was my backup).

OTA, while a fair point, again sounds to me like a technical problem, not a fundamental design problem. E.g. disable the partion hash check so OTA can be installed in a timely way.

Linux has other tools and protections.

1. If there are protections they’re at the system level (not app space). Which means the ROM provider could/should add those same protections as Linux instead of saying “you dont need root, stop asking”
2. AFAIK there are, unfortunately, basically no protections on Linux. Sudo can be trivially shimmed (add malicious exe to PATH) without even having sudo permissions, then the next time user inputs sudo an attacker would have their password. Its bad that its so easy, but its a double standard to say Linux is fine but an (up to date) Android with root is vulnerable.

security risk

All those rooted concerns are true for desktop Linux / MacOS, and they still ship with sudo. If I can’t rm -rf the root partition then its not really my device.

The bootloader wall of shame is nice.