I don’t think I did anything wrong installing EOS (I’ve used it for almost a year now), but the background here is that I was using a Kiwix appimage run as a normal user that can somehow delete a root-owned file but not a root-owned file in a root-owned directory. This normal user is in the ‘wheel’ group (can use sudo), but the appimage was NOT run with sudo.
More details are here with a video showing what happened:
I guess I misunderstood how the permissions worked, I assumed that if a file wasn’t owned by you or if you weren’t in that group’s permission, you couldn’t delete it, especially if the “other” group didn’t have w (modify) permissions.
That’s normally true, if the file is in a directory that you don’t own. But if you own the directory, you can delete everything in it. If you think about it, that actually makes sense.