ya know I've read that too, to add your user to all of them groups, but I've been doing installs of linux Void and others and never bother to add myself to any of them other then after factory install of apps that need use to be added and I've had no problems whatsoever in using network (wifi) audio, and floppy  is about obsolet, I'd think, the most I add myself to is wheel, and myself group, Vbox as it needs it too, but that is an after factory install.

so I do put much stock in that idea...

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 9:58:31 AM UTC-5, Stefan Mühlinghaus wrote:

The groups on your system will probably vary somewhat from that list since you will have diffent software installed and without the software that uses the groups having them is quite pointless. That means you should not just create groups on your system that are not already there.

Serveral groups just allow access to some hardware on your system. These are for example floppy, dialout, audio, video, cdrom, scanner, network. You need to add your user to these groups if that kind of hardware exists and your user needs access to it.

audio, video, cdrom and scanner are probably good ideas.

Networking is usually established by root during boot so your user probably will not need to be in network or dialout.

You need to be in the kvm group if you want to use KVM-based virtual machines.

wireshark, clamav, socklog and pulse-access are really only relevant if you are using the corresponding software and then it depends on the software what it actually means to be in the group. Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer, ClamAV is a virus scanner and Socklog a system message logger. If you do not have/use these programs you do not need to be in their groups. You you are using PulseAudio for audio on your system it may be a good idea for your user to be in the pulse-access group to gain access to the PulseAudio server.

If you create a new user it usually gets its own group with the same name as the user itself. What the members of this group can or cannot do is completely up to you. You may also add your user to the users group but unless you explicitly give this group any special meaning it does not give you any advantages.

The wheel group is used by su and sudo to determine who may gain root access via these commands. If you want that your user should be in wheel. You however also need to configure that behaviour in /etc/sudoers.

I hope this clarifies a few things :)