I've taken to writing down usability issues as I find them and found myself wondering if others are annoyed by this one. When I open an app using kdesu it doesn't use my personal settings, it uses the root settings. While I can change those by executing "kdesu systemsettings" in the Run dialog, how many new users will know to do that? And if there are multiple users on a system, one set of settings gets applied to everyone with root access even though they may prefer different styles.

If you never change the default settings then you won't run into this issue, but it you are like me and change to a different style then it becomes readily apparent.

I called out KDE specifically because that is what I use. I assume other desktop environments have the same issue, but I have not tested for it.

My Suggestion

We need to change the behavior so the root configuration settings only apply when a user is logged in as root, which hopefully doesn't happen often. When I use sudo or kdesu to gain root privilege I should still be using my own configuration choices.

Hopefully issues like this that affect the consistency of the user experience will be fixed. For now I'll continue to manually adjust it.