OSes differ in lockdown capabilities

Most Linux distributions, such as SUSE Linux 10 (shown here), do a good job combining Unix permissions commands such as su with accessible graphical front ends.

Mac OS X boasts the most nicely implemented facilities for managing user rights–and rights elevation–of any operating system eWEEK Labs has tested.

The basic plumbing for managing limited rights already exists in Windows XP, but the current RunAs feature is too spottily implemented to be effective.

The next version of Windows, Vista, is set to boost the cause of user rights management and, hopefully, to make it easy for users to quit spending all their time logged in as admin.