OSNews

Most of the problems with UAC trace back to the fact that they're trying to use a privilege-escalation-based security system with an account that already has administrator rights.

In most Linux systems, you'll log in as an unprivileged user. When you need to do something sensitive, you'll use sudo to run a process as root that will perform the task you want done. Once you run a process ass root... it's root, no more questions asked.

In Vista, you're a privileged user by default. UAC guards certain functions that even the privileged user cannot perform without authorization. UAC will therefore annoy you every time you perform that action, even if you're doing it multiple times from within one process that you've already authorized once.

That's the big problem, IMHO. If Vista had used a Linuxy model, where you weren't privileged by default, you only ever had to escalate a process once, and once you where privileged, the security system wouldn't ask you any more questions, then that approach would've worked fine. The big problem is that you can take pains to run a process as root... and UAC will still whine at you, possibly repeatedly.