few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Thu Mar 27 00:29:14 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 15:12 -0600, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> Sarcastic disclaimer.
> 
> Why not install all binaries into /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin and be 
> done with it, then? Why EVEN have another path, anyway? Better yet, why 
> don't we follow Ubuntu and make sudo the default, make regular users 
> have admin rights! Why do we even need root? What's that? Geeze, I mean 
> why even keep an ancient file system layout?

Believe it or not, these are all pretty useful suggestions.

Links to (/usr)/sbin can be maintained for legacy or FHS compliance.
However due to shortcomings in RPM this isn't feasible.  Instead we'll
just munge the normal user's path so that (s)he doesn't have to go
hunting for useful tools.

Sudo should (optionally) be the default for the first user added, like
say through firstboot.  A checkbox that would have to be cleared that
will drop the user in the wheel group which by default has sudo rights
(that way we don't have to munge the sudors file).

"root" is a legacy concept.  Either the local user is also the admin, or
the admin is a site wide admin where local root accounts are just jokes
and instead things are done as sudo, or through config management
systems.

I also agree that ancient filesystem layouts are needless confusion.
They (almost) made since way back in the day, but fear of chance has
kept them coming forward into modern day operating systems where they're
just not needed, and only add confusion and frustration.  "Where do I
install this binary into?  What level man page do I give this?" etc...

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- All my bits are free, are yours?
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