> If I recover the root password I have access to all that the root password gives me access to.
In POSIX that's the same thing.
Now I cannot say for sure that this is possible on the root account as well - I've hardly used the actual root account since Ubuntu taught me otherwise in 2006 - but I see no obvious reason why you shouldn't be able to encrypt roots home folder the same way we encrypt other home folders.
I'm interested in knowing though in case I'm missing something.
So that guide basically assumes you either already know your decryption passphrase or you don’t have full disk encryption. In either case, changing roots password wouldn’t lock you out of the root file system
Not what I am talking about.
I'm talking about encrypted home folders.
I had no interest to dig deeper, so I am not sure.
Thus if an attacker has root access then it’s literally everything else apart from /root that you need to be worried about. Hence why I discuss disk encryption.
No! Even for me as a non native speaker this is obvious since I have worked in the field for a few years.
A car is a vehicle but saying that "a vehicle means a car is wrong".
In the same way recovering access to the root account might give you the same effect as recovering the password, but often not.
This is a situation were correct wording isn't hard and a situation where it matters in my opinion. People come here to learn and we shouldn't mislead them especially when the cost of fixing it is trivial.
If I recover the access to root, fine, I have access to that machine.
If I recover the root password I have access to all that the root password gives me access to.
On systems where for example home or certain configuration files are encrypted using the password as a key (yes, a bit simplified), this is the difference between getting access to the data or not.
> this is just splitting hair anyway.
No. This is trying to avoid potentially costly misunderstandings.