Capsudo: Rethinking Sudo with Object Capabilities

My most recent mini-adventure with sudo was on the Steam Deck; with OS updates, everything (or at least most?) of what's outside of your home directory is replaced. (In fact, you have to manually opt into being able to write to those directories at all, e.g. to use the system package manager instead of flatpak, by running `sudo steamos-readonly disable`). There are a couple sudo settings I change from the defaults, and because `/etc/sudoers and `/etc/sudoers.d/` (as in the entire directory) were restored to the base versions, my custom settings don't get preserved when updates occur. However, I was surprised to find out that using `visudo` to try to update the settings wasn't actually causing the settings I changed to take effect, which I eventually tracked down to some extra configs getting shipped by the base system in `/etc/sudoers.d`. I looked up what the precedence rules are for sudo rules, and apparently the rule is that anything in `/etc/sudoers.d/` will override `/etc/sudoers`, and the files in `/etc/sudoers.d/` are evaluated in lexigraphical order.

That's how I got where I am today, with a file called `zzz` that I copy into `/etc/sudoers.d/` every time there's a system update.

You don't need to elevate privileges if you give things the right privileges from the start.

Sudo is just a hack to avoid setting up proper capabilities / permissions in the first place.

Every time somebody wants to do something in Linux and they mention Objects, I turn around and go the other way.

These people still do not understand why that userspace became so powerful and so useful.

I also think that's the "solution", which is to craft a new optional userspace experience that leaves traditional unix strings and pipes alone. It's not for me, but I'm sure many would like it. I mean, look at PowerShell on Linux :/

That's functionally equivalent to using sudo but only allowing a certain shell script that's a wrapper for what needs to be done by a given user (to avoid the whole syntax mess). But somehow with more boilerplate.