On 2014-12-05 13:11, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> OK so from https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/440209-ifconfig
> I learnt that it's because /sbin, /usr/sbin etc is not on the normal
> user's path on openSUSE (they are, on Kubuntu). Adding them to PATH
> fixes the situation. (I wasn't even able to do ifconfig without giving
> the password. No idea why this is the openSUSE default...)
Probably because OpenSUSE/SLES are designed as enterprise distributions, 
and their primary use case is having a very small number of sysadmins 
and a potentially large number of normal users.  Ubuntu et al. are 
designed primarily for PC's, where everyone is assumed to be equivalent 
to an administrator.  Personally, I prefer a somewhat hybrid approach 
where everyone has *sbin in their path, but file permissions are used to 
control what non-administrators can run.