Frequently Asked Question

What is the wheel group and is it the same as sudo?

Historically wheel was a Unix convention: a small group of trusted administrators who were allowed to run su to become root. On systems with strict-wheel mode enabled, non-wheel users could not su even if they knew the root password, a gate that mostly mattered when root logins were normal. The name persists today on Red Hat-family distributions (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS), Arch, openSUSE, and most BSDs: members of the wheel group are the ones permitted to use sudo.

On Debian and Ubuntu the equivalent group is just called sudo. The default /etc/sudoers on a Red Hat box contains %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL, while a Debian box has %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL; nothing magical is going on, the group name is just a configuration choice. If you switch distros, expect to add yourself to the locally-named admin group with usermod -aG wheel alice or usermod -aG sudo alice accordingly. A few systems define both groups for compatibility.