The recent versions of KDE and Gnome that ship crap like Ubuntu has taken a turn for the worse. It used to be that GUI was kind of secure. Then the homos on both the KDE and Gnome project decided to just rewrite their own shit instead of using time test crap. Because, as halfway competent engineer will tell you, fixing bugs isn't fun. It's just easier to rewrite the crap.
The end result is now, that on certain unnamed PC's, you can issue the magical OOM command, and viola, you will have root.