On Kubuntu/Ubuntu, you preface the privileged cmds with ‘sudo’, and provide your
own password (as a proxy) whereas
on SUSE (and most other distros), you ‘su’ first as a separate step.
I prefer the older ‘su’ setup, where I must know/provide the separate
root-password, mostly just because
I assign a much stronger password to root than to my user acct.
[Ubuntu’s default setup is a weak, shortcut approach, in my view. Tho, they
document how to convert it over to the more normal behavior.]
And, you can tweak SUSE’s sudo to achieve Ubuntu behavior, tho
I 'don’t know where the writeup for that is.
[Just different management setup styles, to confuse newbies switching
from one distro to another. ]
As for the differences between su and sudo I can’t comment, but I can comment on lsusb. I just tried it and it works fine on a user account. You might fire up YaST, go in to software management and check to see if usbutils is installed.
]