Package managers are way more modern than that and their design does by itself not require root (see pip). You can in fact run most package managers without root, you just won't be able to modify system files. You can use them to install a chroot as regular user, e.g. `zypper --installroot ~/tw install bash`.
FUSE doesn't really relate to single vs. multi-user AFAICT.
Users are perfectly sandboxed if you configure the system that way. Depending on the distribution that's even the default.
> You can in fact run most package managers without root
It is very clear from the context that dehrmann was talking about Linux distro package managers (Apt, Yum, Dnf, Apk, etc.) and as far as I know they all require root, or at least I have never once seen someone use them without root.
Nix requires root (at least by default). Brew I'll give you - I didn't know you can use it on Linux. Do people actually do that enough that it works reliably?
Clearly talking about OS level package managers.
It’s a good trick to have in your back pocket if you’re given an unprivileged user on a compute node and want to make use of modern tools.
On succifiently offline systems, you can still run software like that. It's quite freeing to have a server with 777 on your home directory when the biggest problem it'll cause is someone pranking you by altering your terminal color scheme to something hideous.
I don't know about that... It doesn't even support multiple administrators. And you can't even distinguish between actions performed by the system itself and the administrative user.
Yes I know about sudo.
What do you need to do and what do the (even audit) logs say about who performed an activity whenever administrative activity happens?
You can easily create multiple accounts that have the uid 0. Groups are a fundamental part of discretionary access system and several administrative groups exist by default. Your modern desktop oriented distribution may not take advantage of these facts.
> logs say about who performed an activity whenever administrative activity happens?
Simply enable process accounting and setup a program to capture that information. The early BSD distributions had this and had many command line tools to query the information it stored.
The authors of Unix have taken most of the concepts of an hierarchical file system from Multics, the main exception being the security features, which have been replaced with the simpler owner-group-all permission bits, together with features like setuid/setgid, which may be OK for simple use cases but which is inadequate for a system with many users, where not all of them can be trusted.
While perhaps the term "user" is no longer the best, there is a need even more than before to run programs with limited rights, corresponding to the rights of some pseudo-users, which should not be able to access or modify anything belonging to the real human user, unless a special permission is granted.