root account?

Is it worth getting the root account enabled (administrator) or is the standard user account which you create yourself quite powerful as it is?

I'm just tryig to get as much info on OSX as possible because I'm going to be switching over from Windows to mac in the next week or so.

 

Up to you. What do you want to do with OS X? OS X will always request you to authenticate when you're about to make changes to system sensitive files regardless of what account you're using, so you shouldn't need to worry too much about accidentally deleting system vital files.

I personally use an administrator account, since I'm the only one using the machine and I don't want to be restricted in any way.

 

Is it difficult to enable the root (admin) account for primary account. Are there any negatives to doing this?

 

OS X will set up your first user account as admin (or root as you state) by default. The negative to using an admin account as your main would be that other people might sabotage your system if you don't password protect/log off, and that you might still damage the system despite the authentication (if you authenticate by mistake for example).

 

Like Budding said, the first user by default has admin privileges. So it is not difficult to set up.

The thing is, even when logged-in as admin, Mac OS X will ask you for your password before doing anything that requires root'y privileges---like writing to system folders. Similarly, the shell requires you to 'sudo some-root-only-command' to run potentially-dangerous commands as root. It won't work automagically just because you're logged in as an admin user.

In conclusion, I would say it's pretty safe to work logged in as admin.