Expanding-brain meme escalating from sudo to always logging in as root
Description
Four-panel expanding-brain meme. Panel 1 shows a dim X-ray style head with a small brain beside the bold text “sudo.” Panel 2 shows a brighter, sparkly brain with the label “doas.” Panel 3 adds a more radiant brain and a black chat overlay that reads: “RepresentativeCut486 35m 🟢 Neon Genesis Evangellion - just run everything as root.” Panel 4 depicts a galaxy-like, fully lit brain with another chat overlay: “pipe_heart_dev_null Now - Don’t even create another user. Just be root.” The visual joke satirically portrays increasingly “enlightened” approaches to privilege escalation, moving from sensible least-privilege commands to the reckless security anti-pattern of working exclusively as the root user, a common topic in *nix CLI and sysadmin circles
Comments
28Comment deleted
Enterprise security evolution: sudo, doas, ssh root@prod, and finally the cosmic epiphany - stick it in a Docker container, run as root, and tell the auditors “namespace isolation is least-privilege.”
After 20 years of explaining why running as root is bad, you realize the real vulnerability was the users we created along the way - because they'll just sudo everything anyway without reading the warnings
The evolution from sudo to 'just be root' perfectly captures that moment in every sysadmin's career where you realize the intern who's been running production containers as UID 0 hasn't had a single permission issue... because they've eliminated the entire concept of security boundaries. It's the systems administration equivalent of solving race conditions by wrapping everything in a global mutex - technically it works, but you've just traded one class of problems for a catastrophic single point of failure
Privilege escalation roadmap: sudo → doas → run as root → securityContext: privileged; rebrand it as “platform enablement” and schedule the root cause analysis for Q4
Privileged: true is the cloud-native spelling of 'just be root'
Sudo for architects drafting RBAC; doas for purists shaving cycles; root for the SRE who knows one breached container owns it all anyway
Just be yourself Comment deleted
I'm happy go lucky not knowing what these words mean 😃 Comment deleted
Never used linux? Comment deleted
or always be root Comment deleted
Just be ring 0 without an OS Comment deleted
Thank god I didn't Comment deleted
Even someone like me used linux for that few occasion Comment deleted
Wait you can add another user to root? Comment deleted
I normally run everything in the kernel /s Comment deleted
Whats wrong with being root? U just have to patch vlc so it does not complain that its running as root but everything else is fine. I mean u own ur system, not systemd or something, why would u limit urself in what u can do w ur system and then use a random crutch software to do something u cant normally do? Comment deleted
Yeah man it’s annoying that chrome refuses to run as root too! /s💀💀💀 Comment deleted
--no-sandbox Comment deleted
Jesus💀💀💀💀 Comment deleted
Thunar (Xfce file manager) is also crazy about being root. Such programs must have been written by complete idiots, as every other program benefits from root privileges! 🤪 Comment deleted
Pcmanfm-qt (file manager from lxqt) also shows permanent red strip when running as root, and kde-apps/dolphin also shows warning, but these are really easy to patch, you just search src/ for "running as root" and remove that if() statement Comment deleted
or invert the boolean in if.... thus showing warning when not running as root Comment deleted
But whats funnier to run hyprland as root the flag is --i-am-really-stupid Comment deleted
💀💀😂😂😂 Comment deleted
doas is cope unless you are using bsd Comment deleted
I like it Comment deleted
but you cant trust either of the maintainers who port doas to Linux worse idea than using sudo Comment deleted
Run everything from kernel cmdline Comment deleted