sudo

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with sudo, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Can't tell if keystrokes register or whether a typed or pasted password was wrong2026-03-21
Proposed password echo feedback with multiple characters appearing and disappearing would be confusing2026-03-21
Keystrokes sometimes don't register and paste fails with no feedback2026-03-21
No visible feedback on password length, so mistakes are hard to correct2026-03-21
Typing a sudo password shows no feedback, confusing inexperienced users2026-03-21
Password prompt gives no visual feedback while typing, which is confusing2026-03-21
Two second delay after mistyping password is annoying and unnecessary2026-02-27
Sudo hangs for 60 seconds when DNS is broken and can't be cancelled with ctrl+c2026-02-03
Repeated password prompts on Linux are annoying with no shorter PIN option2026-01-11
Sudo hangs for tens of seconds after hostname change, with no clear explanation2023-11-04
Hard to create a sudo user or run a program with admin rights in a desktop GUI2023-02-06
Has to type sudo before each command, which gets tiring for multiple commands2022-09-11
No visible sign of which user or machine a terminal is running as, so commands hit the wrong box2017-06-07