SALE - Fedora Awesome

Project Discussion
#1

You know… Fedora could make a lot of difference… with experience Awesome… if it could ship out of the box… with tools Awesome.

– An unspoken pledge from a user of @sindresorhus/awesome

I write this with a heavy heart. And to share my pain with you. The pain I was developing for two days. After which I screamed.

sed -i 's|^PermitRootLogin\s+.*|PermitRootLogin yes|' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

If your eyes are not bleeding, I envy you. Because you probably haven’t spent years of sleepless nights reading about Linux security to protect your files. This line is pure blasphemy. It enables password login for root through SSH.

If your eyes are bleeding, I envy you. You haven’t spent hours only to scream at the sed truth - this line doesn’t work. It does nothing. It doesn’t change the file like it is supposed to do. Because of the little +.

And this… is Not Awesome. It could save me 2 days if… if 5 years ago… somebody would make a decision, to ship sd instead of sed into the core Ubuntu docker image.

sd '^PermitRootLogin\s+.*' 'PermitRootLogin yes' < /etc/ssh/sshd_config

There are many stories alike. Human stories. Like how to see how much memory a process takes? Like a human.

ps afu | awk 'NR>1 {$5=int($5/1024)"M";}{ print;}'

Find all files with "chrom"e in current dir?

$ find . -exec grep chrome
find: missing argument to `-exec'

Nope. Perhaps missing rg chrome could help?

The list of agony is rather huge, and by large margin here I am talking to survivors. Those who passed the trial and adapted themselves to The Penguin Way of doing things. Moving with "awk"ward displacements as "sed"uctive legacy from octal age.

Yea, I know that many are still prefer beer to smoothies and i3 to GNOME, and the idea of change is nothing close to something one can take easily. Because we know the cost of breaking things. But on the other side, how Awesome one’s experience could be if the default experience for both newbies and die-hard Unix hackers after an incremental lifelearning journey would be a perfect, time saving distro? That is called Fedora Awesome!!! :anger: :dash: :robot:

It may sound utopic and idealistic, because after these 60 years it looks like nothing really changed. But, I am writing this in #engineering channel, and these the gears on the table.

  1. Stories
  2. Awesome Lists of Awesome
  3. Lists of Pain
  4. Engineering

That should constitute a perfect SALEs pitch I crafted out of procrastination. :smiley: Instead of debugging some Ansible playbooks with :root:, :password: and :container:. :penguin: :whale: :beers: :baby_bottle: :satellite: Hopefully you enjoyed it as well. :dizzy: :zzz:

1 Like
#2

@abitrolly I’m having a little trouble following here. What’s the idea exactly? To generate some user experience use cases, lists of things people like, lists of problems? It seems like from your first examples, you are mostly concerned with more user-friendly alternatives to traditional Unix tools?

1 Like
#3

User-friendly alternatives to traditional Unix tools, yes.

#4

I think there’s room for that, but I don’t think we’d be successful in replacing everything suddenly. This seems like an interesting project for a Spin or Remix.

1 Like
#5

Just replacing won’t work. It should be an incremental process with user stories, as the UX for many tools to serve as real replacement for daily task is better, but not ideal either.

Ideally apply genetic algorithm to distro evolution - set the desired fitness test, let activities mutate the result into different sets, and then choose the one that has the best fit. Just one Spin or Remix is unlikely to cover this process.

#6

Because it is not supposed to do what you think it will do. sed uses basic regular expressions so it doesn’t understand extended regular expressions (like +) (unless you use -E option) and PCRE (like \s):

The problem is not somebody shipped sed instead of some other program. The problem is blindly assuming a program would behave same as some other newly written program without reading its documentation and learning how it works.

1 Like
#7

If you imply that I expected sed to work like sd, then no. I looked for the alternative, only after I wasted my 2 days and fixed the issue. I just had enough problems with sed alone in the past to go and write this post.

The real problem that I am trying to solve is that there is no distro that lets people use latest technology advancements in fullest to solve pressing problems that we need to be solved. From open source sustainability to climate crisis.

I am not against stable or clean distros where people are forced to spend their braincells much like 48 years ago when sed was created, with no internet, mobiles, IRC, StackOverflow, TikTok and UX studies. I do not mind using vim in Cool Retro Term or reading man help once in a while for a bit of nostalgia, and as my lifespan comes closer to an end, I question myself if that’s really how I want to spend it.