Sudo is unusable in a GUI. Simple as that. It's unintuitive to create a user with sudo rights, and it is unintuitive to run a program with admin rights in a DE.

Vista upgraded the security expectations, although rather harshly compared to XP, but much more useful than anything Linux had or still has. Being prompted vs. looking up commands in manpages/wikis/blogs are two very different things.

Pretending that blindly typing "sudo" in a terminal prompt anytime a command doesn't work without it doesn't make it any better than UAC.

If I try to run, say, software updates on Ubuntu, it prompts me for my password/fingerprint, isn't that the same?

I imagine usability might've changed over time, but in my default Ubuntu DE I can't run an app as Admin via a "Run As" option. Have to delve into config files to change either shortcut properties or to manually create a "Run As" option.

As far as prompts go - why does Chrome/Chromium prompt me on a clean install for a gpg key ring password upon every run?

Is that not worse Than Vista?

My point is, Linux, even at its most refined, most popular version, lags behind Vista.

I've not seen that Chrome prompt.

I guess you can't run things as root, but I've never noticed before now, guess I've never needed to