Alan Cox Calls Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro"

[uid313]

One nice undocumented feature of Fedora18, is the ability to log into the system in GUI mode as root. Moving files, deleting files, copying files, renaming files, in fact directory and file manipulation with a GUI interface is so much faster and safer than with command line.

Fedora18 recognizes that system maintainers are not dumbells, who have to be prevented from using a graphical user interface from a root logon.

That is really stupid!

You should not be able to login as root.

You should use sudo.

[lsatenstein]

I guess you wonder why it is great. Ans. Because it reduces errors as long as user does not concurrently use the web. Root passwords are confidential.

imagine in command mode doing a rm *~ and the user sneezes or his hand shakes and it ends up with rm * ~

Its very hard to do big damage with GUI, and it is much easier to avoid mistakes.

Naturally, the regular user can be added to group root, which is not really blockable via pam.

In conclusion, you don't give a five year old the keys to the car and tell him to drive. By the same token, you control who has root access in GUI mode.

Sudo is another open door. Every distribution I have used allows sudo su

[AdamW]

Leslie, please don't recommend people log in graphically as root. It is highly insecure and not to be advised in any case for any reason. Fedora is not designed to encourage this.

[AdamW]

Hmm, good points indeed. The multiple processes issue is also in YaST, and can get quite annoying (as is its inability to asynchronously download and install packages).

That raises another question, though - why did the UI have to change? Why not leave it as it was before, just on a new codebase?

So a couple of reasons...

1. the oldUI code was not cleanly separated from the backend, they were pretty much tied together.
2. the old UI kinda sucked. I mean, it wasn't good. Re-doing it has been on the table for a while. Just because the new UI has some teething problems doesn't mean the old one exactly cured cancer - tell me http://media.if-not-true-then-false....ation-type.png is a great screen, for instance (lots of people got *used* to it, but take a step back and tell me it's an awesome screen). Or the screen you got when you clicked on 'Change device' on http://media.if-not-true-then-false....oot-loader.png (sadly not pictured in that walkthrough), that was awesome. Or my favourite giant ball of win, and pretty much where Mo started seriously looking at the installer design: https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/...enshot_f14.png .

If you read through the archives of Mo's blog at http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/category/fedora/anaconda/ , which I really highly recommend doing, you can see where a lot of the newUI design came from, and a lot of the problems Mo identified in the old design. It's not just redesign for redesign's sake. The post on creating a RAID /home is particularly interesting when it comes to the new partitioning approach - http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2011/12/14...g-ui-thus-far/ .

[Rallos Zek]

That is really stupid!

You should not be able to login as root.

You should use sudo.

Its only stupid if you think everyone is an idiot. Thankfully there are distros that don't treat their users as idiots.

That's horrible. You are supposed to do this, or an equivalent thereof:

kdesu dolphin .

Again logging in as root is not stupid or horrible.

[AdamW]

Its only stupid if you think everyone is an idiot. Thankfully there are distros that don't treat their users as idiots.



Again logging in as root is not stupid or horrible.

Logging into the desktop as root is never correct, as it causes all kinds of processes which are not intended to run as root and do likely do not have proper protection against running as root to run as root. Logging into a console as root is of course fine, though some would argue sudo is a superior model.

[finalzone]

Sorry, but it does make sense to have a log out, always, it means: close local applications, leave computer ready for remote access. (Also: restart X server gracefully)

If you have read carefully, no logout applies for the case where there is a single user and a single desktop environment.
What you described above means testing yourself and see if there is no logout when starting from console mode.

[BO$$]

Its only stupid if you think everyone is an idiot. Thankfully there are distros that don't treat their users as idiots.



Again logging in as root is not stupid or horrible.

Yes. Yes it is. You are back to windows style security. Remember how everybody logs in as administrator in windows? Remember how the advantage of linux was that it taught users not to run everything with full privileges as it was not safe? Now what do you do, go back to windows style of security? (that is, lack of security)

[Hamish Wilson]

I just fucking love the justification level this guy reaches: look! Others have problems too! Look at Ubuntu! They have bugs too! We have bugs in previous releases so why shouldn't we have bugs in this one? Bugs are perfectly normal! I mean what is so wrong with having bugs? You should learn to cherish your bugs! Learn to live with them, learn from them, accept them! They are OK! You are OK! See? You are both OK! Marry your bugs! Love them! Learn to be patient and solve your bugs instead of doing your work! Everybody has bugs! Why should we be below them and have less?

If that was the only thing you got out of his post you clearly were not reading it well enough.

There are billions of combinations of hardware! Why do you think it should work? It shouldn't! If the last past 3 releases it didn't work it's because you weren't lucky! Not our fault at all! Why should we be expected to actually test code on different machines? It's insane, think of the billions of combinations!

They do test their code on different machines. That is why they put out Alphas and Betas. That is why AdamW actually does work for QA. But even that will only cover a small fraction of the machines the system is likely to be ran on.

And in a different note: You rewrote the installer? Bwhahahaha! RULE NUMBER 0: NEVER REWRITE APPLICATIONS FROM GROUND UP! I thought you knew this stuff! They teach this shit early when you learn coding for christ sake. Everytime there is a new idiot thinking that he is better and starts to rewrite an application thinking this time it will be better, and in the end, after trillions of bugs and frustrated users that leave his product, he ends up where he was before he begun!

I somehow doubt that this was done completely from the ground up, but even if it was, they posted a very lengthy and reasonable rationale as to why this was necessary and followed a very strict and cohesive road-map. It was not like, as you assert, some kid came in and brashly claimed they could do this better. That kid sounds a bit like you though.

That maintenance thing is just bullshit. Learn to use interfaces so that when implementations change you can still have your old functionality. I wonder how incompetent can you be. Then I realize this is Red Hat we're talking about....

I thought it was explained that it was because of the way that the old Anaconda used it's interfaces that it became problematic to maintain. Maybe I got that impression because I actually went through all of his posts?

BO$$ - always grabbing on to one easily demonstrated false assumption and running with it.

[hax0r]

Now he got mad and quit his job. At least Greg H found out this wonderful distro called Archlinux, smart man!