Probably it would be better to say that running rm as root is bad. Then again, almost anything as root is bad. So pretty much, I would suggest deleting the entire OP and saying "Using Sudo is dangerous, try to minimize usage".
The average computer user probably cares more about his/her data than about the program files, in which case cleaning up your home directory is probably equivalent to wiping root.
On the other hand, and I haven't tested this, if your home directory is mounted on a different device/filesystem, I think even if you try to delete / as root, you'd get a permission-denied error when you hit your home directory.
hmmm not game to test that..... Your right the OS can easily be reinstalled, my data not so..... that's why I do have a separate home partition
Actually, I just tested that and it appears that I was almost completely wrong. rm quite happily recursed into the mount point, killing everything within, but could not remove the mount point itself. So my advice stands: try not to delete your home directory.
Linux servers are configured differently -- each service [hopefully] runs under its own account, which limits the amount of damage it could do. Unfortunately, most home computers are set up such that everything that matters to you is owned by your account. I'm not about to go partitioning my data -- it's just a trade-off for convenience.
