Hey, I’m still on holiday just now, but, as a quick response, we have already had some discussion about this issue here: Node Manager UX and Issues - #560 by chriso
See that post and some of the subsequent back and forth around it.
Hey @Traktion
It’s not supposed to be a hybrid. It’s supposed to be one or the other. You either run the services system-wide or in user-mode. For system-wide, you create the service using sudo, but the process launched by the service runs as a safe user, which is non-root. As the post above mentions, the user-mode part was introduced for use with the launchpad, because we didn’t want to prompt people for passwords.
Right now, the node manager makes the distinction between system/user based on whether it runs with sudo or not. The confusion results when users initially use sudo, then with subsequent commands, they sometimes forget. This mistake is inevitable. Prior to the introduction of user-mode services, you would have gotten an error, telling you to use sudo. To support user-mode services, that was removed. From a UX point of view, we had some discussion in the linked thread as to how to deal with it. Haven’t had a chance to work on it yet, so still open to suggestions there. My favourite suggestion was having some kind of command you run which changes your mode from service/user and all subsequent commands will operate in that mode, until it is otherwise changed.