Why would an adversary being able to execute code as root on a personal computer be a bigger threat than their being able to execute code as non-root? Surely just about any of the stuff that a malicious hacker might want to do to someone's personal computer can be done without root... right?
For one, as non-root user you are tied to the permissions system and can't access most of the data.
If one of your services (let's say sql) get hacked, they are tied to sql user, and unless the achieve privilege escalation, they can't mangle with other services data (eg webserver).
Also network wide, a non-root user can't use different protocol than tcp and udp.
The only reason you can ping as a regular user is because of the setuid on the ping program, otherwise icmp is not allowed to non-root users.
There are of course other reasons, but these are some examples on how it would be different.
I think you're just illustrating my point. Those concerns don't apply to personal computers and they don't stop an intruder from doing anything they might practically want to do for gain. Like installing ransomware, participating in a botnet, exfiltrating personal files/browser cookies/etc (all accessible as non-root!), ...
With a user shell, I can grab their browser data, personal documents, and try to set up persistent background daemons that listen on programs and do keylogging/screenshotting (harder on Wayland than it was on X11).
With root, I can read all program memory, try to extract decryption keys for encrypted filesystems, modify the kernel, punch open backdoors, modify any arbitrary program, read all user files, etc.
A notable extra issue is the rise of AI agents, which often eagerly test the boundaries of every sandbox they are placed within. I would not run an AI agent as root, nor would I give it full access to a rootful container runtime.
The kinds of things that you list that an attacker could do with root access don't sound like things that an actual attacker would want if they are infiltrating random people's personal computers for their own gain. Modifying the kernel or arbitrary programs is so far beyond what typical malware tries to do that I think it seems kind of silly to consider those things when evaluating the security of an operating system designed for personal computers.
In my opinion the biggest advantage of podman is that it uses pods with basically the same config and behavior as kubernetes does. As long as you just use podman pods instead (or possibly via) compose files you likely just notice that only the pod has one (and not any more) veth interface, that you reach other containers inside a pod via localhost:$port (instead of $service-name:$port) but when you switch later on to kubernetes you are already familiar with some basics.
For one, as non-root user you are tied to the permissions system and can't access most of the data. If one of your services (let's say sql) get hacked, they are tied to sql user, and unless the achieve privilege escalation, they can't mangle with other services data (eg webserver).
Also network wide, a non-root user can't use different protocol than tcp and udp. The only reason you can ping as a regular user is because of the setuid on the ping program, otherwise icmp is not allowed to non-root users.
There are of course other reasons, but these are some examples on how it would be different.
With root, I can read all program memory, try to extract decryption keys for encrypted filesystems, modify the kernel, punch open backdoors, modify any arbitrary program, read all user files, etc.
A notable extra issue is the rise of AI agents, which often eagerly test the boundaries of every sandbox they are placed within. I would not run an AI agent as root, nor would I give it full access to a rootful container runtime.
Are people really terminally online enough to understand this?
OpenMandriva would be my next guess, but it's not a newer distro.