I extracted the Haswel Cinnamon tarball as su root, and the /etc directory has permissions for the underlying user (engineer in my case). There are a scattering of other files and directories for this user, for instance boot.conf, the /etc/conf,d directory (but not the files), nsswitch.conf, etc.

Note that 'engineer' won't exist when I reboot into this distro. Oh, engineer is user 1000, I just realized.