User Account Created at Install has root Privilege?

I’m building a workstation for kids at our day care facility. I downloaded the latest install media (12/22/2019 I think) and booted into the install program. I selected an online install and proceeded through the steps. When I got to the user account creation, I did the following:

Name: kids

login name: kids
password to keep account safe: ****

auto-login: yes
different password for admin: yes (I then enter in my admin password we will call “xxxxxx”).

I’m selecting XFCE4 for my desktop by the way.

Once installation is complete, I am having the following issues…

  1. Autologin does not work (I have been able to figure a workaround solution for now).

  2. My user “kids” account appears to have root privileges with their password. IE, I open a terminal and type sudo pacman -Syyu and it asks me for “password for kids”. I try using the admin password “xxxxxx” but it doesn’t work, only my kids “****” password.

Is this what I should expect or is there something I did incorrectly during the install?

you didnt select make root on that account ? made the kids account later on ?

That’s how it works as default since the Kids account automatically becomes a member in the sudo group. In order to stop this you have to remove that account from that group.

The first user at install will be a “sudoer”, meaning with sudo command user gets elevated privileges to do anything.

You can create a second user without sudoer rights:

    useradd -m "username"

For the absolute best solution in the world, eliminate sudo. Unfortunately, that is extremely hard if not impossible to do. As you can tell, when it comes to Linux I am old school, and not a proponent of sudo at all. That is my humble opinion.

As a next best solution:
Remove sudo privileges from a user without deleting the user

Pudge

My opinion is the opposite. Coming from Windows, I guess, but my old-school approach is to never use the root / administrator account for anything. ALWAYS use a user with admin privileges / sudo.

I guess the current system makes sense in that typically the person installing the OS would be the admin and by extension would want to have the ability to elevate for admin rights. However I’m not certain if the text in the create user section of the installer is very clear on what is happening. The fact that it asks me for an “admin” password would not lead me to believe that the user account I created will also have root privileges as well.

So maybe my conclusion is there isn’t anything really wrong with how the installer creates the user but maybe some additional text to let people know that the username will also have sudo privileges with their password and that is separate from setting a root password on the same screen.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sudo#Example_entries

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