Why I should I care about "knox" warranty can I still root my S5? I have been using my Samsung Galaxy S5 phone for over a year as the manufacturer intends, NOT rooted.  Its a great phone IMO because it has capable enough hardware, but not being root on my phone that I paid good money for isn't cool,  

The way I see it is I'm root/admistrator on all of my linux/microsoft machines why doesn't samsung trust me to be on my phone which I use probably more than my laptops.

The main reasons I wish to be root is to remove all the "bloatware" which I never use, to prevent further updates from stealing my memory, and generally for the principle of it.  The most current update (which I absolutely refuse to download) is asking for 800MB for "Galaxy Apps store" and "a finger print scanner for microsoft exchange apps". 

I think it is completely unreasonable to surrender nearly a GB of space for something I will likely never use, yet the notifications will not go away.

I asked a question a while back where I quickly found out that rooting my phone using Towelroot was not possible since geohot now works for google and that rooting my phone would cause the warranty to be void but why should I care about this?

TLDR

I don't have insurance on my device anyway and have had it for more than a year.

Why should I care about "tripping knox" and is there a way to root my phone without making it a pretty paperweight?
Knox warranty void has been discussed for a long time but I can't find consistent results on what it actually means.  

Some sources say, that it only covers data security, a warranty that makes sure your data is safe and private, so tripping the Knox warranty void flag doesn't void your hardware warranty.
(where I live there is a law that hardware warranty is independent from software warranty, so they have to repair your device even if the software has been modified, given that the software was not responsible for the damage ie. cracked screen, blown up battery etc.)

Other sources say, that it completely voids your warranty and if you break your phone, you are left with an expensive paperweight.

All of them say, that tripping the Knox warranty void flag is permanent because it's written into the bootloader, though, some devs found a way to not trigger that flag while rooting and found a way to force the system to overwrite the memory using a modified bootloader that is larger than the original one.
All of those methods have a higher risk of bricking your device than thousands of root attempts. Rooting is kind of secure given that you only modify a few files to give yourself full control over your phone.