Possible to password protect lock screen but nothing else?

Its all part of Unix, you have to type in your password, when making system changes. If you install system wide software for example, password is usually required. I don't know if you heard of that mac malware that was big a while ago. But if you didn't need to enter your password to install, there would be a lot more affected macs.

The thing in system prefs, is to allow you to change a preference. Without the password, you can't change any prefs

 

No, Microsoft was requiring a simple "Confirm or Deny" dialog to be answered, but no password for many tasks. This conditioned the user to simply click Confirm any time the dialog popped up, because it happened so often that they didn't want to spend the time reading each and every one. They've toned it down, but still ask for many things. In addition, requiring the administrator password for the tasks that Apple does is one reason why malware has not been a major problem so far on the Mac platform.

jW