New installation asks for password when I 'sudo -i'

Ah, I finally found the difference, all systems except the new pi have a file /etc/sudoers.d/010_pi-nopasswd which provides the no password "sudo -i".

The remaining question is why the latest system didn't get this file installed. Has rpi-imager been changed so that it no longer installs it?

As I understand it, the latest OS image now has that limitation that you need a password for sudo. My Xubuntu desktop has been like that for years. 25 years ago I had BSD installed on a 386 and it required a separate password for root. They are just trying to make the computers a little more secure. They got rid of pi and raspberry a couple of years ago. This is just one more step in that direction.

It was a deliberate decision to require a password for sudo in the latest release. That's been the norm in most Linux distros for years. Pi was the exception.

Everybody is fashionably conscientious about 'security' these days...

I wish they'd make this sort of change more explicit. It had me confused for a while. I have loads of other Linux based systems and I'm used to them requiring a password for sudo so I don't have an issue with that. I just don't like things like this changing without the change being noted somewhere.

Are there release notes anywhere that would have told me?

I read about it somewhere. It might have been this:

The RPi confused me too. If I don't have to give a password for sudo, why do I even have to type sudo? I like consistent and the Pi was the odd man out.

I always assumed it was there (Pi's sudo) simply to avoid you doing damage by accident, rather than to prevent others from using your login to do damage.

'Here be Tygers' as it were...

Yes, that's how I've always thought of it on the Pi, it's a way to meke sure you know that you have root privelege rather than s security thing.

The new default Pi configuration is very common for Linux (and macOS) systems. Still, justifying the change on security grounds is rather dubious: an attacker who compromises your non-root account can capture any password you enter via it with the aid of a keylogger and some patience, so in practice the password requirement is more like a speedbump than a barrier.

If you don’t like a default configuration you can change it.

sudo means 'run this command as root'. Otherwise something would be run as a normal user. root has many special powers, which you ordinarily wouldn't give to normal things. If you ran everything as root, it would have a lot of detrimental effects beyond that command you wanted to run.

Unlike Windows, there are no 'Administrator' accounts that have extra powers. Instead you have to temporarily borrow those powers from root via sudo. The password check is just a proof that you really have the rights to your account and intend to do this dangerous action, rather than say some script you downloaded trying to 'sudo dobadthing' without you knowing.

Theo

iirc it was SuSE in the early 2000's that switched the wallpaper to bright red with black cartoon-style bombs if you were running as root. Life was simpler then -- every Linux and AIX box in our shop had the same root password, wolf359.

Was Ubuntu the first distro that more or less bypassed setting up an explicit root account?

On Windows, you have have a regular account with administrator privileges, and that account can Do More Stuff. Most of the time you're being you, and not being administrator - it's just that your account can do those extra things when needed.

On Linux, root has administrator privileges but it's a Very Bad Idea to use root as a regular user account, especially at the GUI. So typically you just borrow the use of root for a short while to do something and then drop back to a non-root user.

In one way of doing things you can 'login as root' eg on a console, do your things, then logout. sudo is just a way to make that more convenient when you are logged in as another user.

That's not to say you can't login as root on the GUI and run your web browser, but you may find things don't work properly. There are increasingly more checks that say things like 'if uid==0 then error else ...' to guard against exploits where the attacker gets root privs.

Theo