[RndTbl] [Board] Newsletter Fodder: Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change

[Trevor Cordes]

On 2020-04-30 Bradford C Vokey wrote:
> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-home-directory-management-is-about-to-undergo-major-change/

(Adding rndtbl.)

Poettering's gone too far.  This will be the straw that breaks the
camel's back.  He's going to get blowback on this one.  And that
article author is obviously not a real linux user... only servers need
to allow access to the .ssh directory for login?  Uh... tell that to
all the users that remotely access their own home computers via ssh.

I don't want my home dir encrypted.  I don't want the easily editable
passwd and groups turned into some abomination encrypted/signed JSON
crap that I can't edit with a text editor.  I don't want to worry about
each user having a virtual FS in a file taking up gobs of space it
doesn't need.  And then average users hitting their predefined limit
and not knowing how to make it bigger?

It's not just ssh that needs access to files in the home dir... what
about:

- backups: it's going to be real efficient backing up 5G encrypted
  containers... NOT!

- procmailrc: how's procmail going to find each user's settings and
  rules?

- scp: what if you want to scp a file from your home dir without
  logging in first?

- maildirs: on my systems the MTA/MDA will put the files in each user's
  home dir under Maildir.

- crontab: if a user has some stuff happening in cron, how on earth is
  that going to access home?

They better provide an option to stick with the old way of doing
things!!  This is one change I will never get behind.  It once again
shows that Poettering never was a real *NIX user and doesn't have the
slightest clue why we love the OS.

And what does this all buy us?  If you wanted a LUKS setup of some sort,
you can already do that without this garbage.  It's change for the sake
of change (and control) and I use Linux precisely to try to avoid that.