Yes. The root user has access to all personal data, including your home folder.
If someone gets physical access to the PC, he can log in as root easily and mess with your data.
If he just plugs in your hard drive, he can’t see anything relevant.
I wonder if the question is in reference to unlocking the root account and setting a password for it. I don’t know of any distros that actually have an unlocked root account and leave its password as empty, but I suppose its not completely impossible.
That being said, if an attacker gets physical access to your PC, its game over anyways. If your drive isn’t encrypted with something like LUKS, then they can just boot up a live USB of whatever distro they want, mount the drive, and have easy access to its contents.
Ideally if you want to protect your PC against physical attacks, you’ll at the minimum want some sort of drive encryption enabled, and preferably with Secure Boot enabled with your own keys enrolled if your machine supports it.
Yes. The root user has access to all personal data, including your home folder.
If someone gets physical access to the PC, he can log in as root easily and mess with your data. If he just plugs in your hard drive, he can’t see anything relevant.
I wonder if the question is in reference to unlocking the root account and setting a password for it. I don’t know of any distros that actually have an unlocked root account and leave its password as empty, but I suppose its not completely impossible.
That being said, if an attacker gets physical access to your PC, its game over anyways. If your drive isn’t encrypted with something like LUKS, then they can just boot up a live USB of whatever distro they want, mount the drive, and have easy access to its contents.
Ideally if you want to protect your PC against physical attacks, you’ll at the minimum want some sort of drive encryption enabled, and preferably with Secure Boot enabled with your own keys enrolled if your machine supports it.