Systemd-homed: Systemd Now Working To Improve Home Directory Handling

[Slithery]

I'll never be using a feature that will potentially lock my data in case of bugs for ever.

It just uses regular LUKS volumes that can be opened/mounted with the usual cryptsetup commands. Any of the bugs you refer to would be with LUKS not systemd-homed.

Am I understanding it correctly that homed don't allow for a standard directory anymore?

Nope. The LUKS volume is just one of the available backends, standard directories are another.

[Ananace]

This actually looks like a really interesting idea, though I'm curious to see how well it'd handle the combination of both local and shared storage.
I'd love to have a base version of my homedir available on a flashdrive or just stored on my NAS so I could keep working on my various projects regardless of the system - and no longer have to manually track dotfiles between them, but on the other hand I'd really quite like to keep my various user-installed games and the like stored locally on only my desktop.

[R41N3R]

I wonder how systemd-homed could solve the issue of home growing way to fast. Actually with flatpak and the likes of Steam that is a real issue to re-use your home on another system without first cleaning it up.

[Cape]

Next question being: Is Linux any better? It's nowadays pretty much 'buttboy' for commercial interests to do what they want to it..

OFC not! Actually - with the FSF becoming a diversity hellhole - we should be very worried for the future of Free Software for all users!
This doesn't mean we should carry on a 70yo OS.

Ideally I'd like to see RMS founding a new organization with the intent of forking GNU and slowly transition it to the 21st century by incorporating piece after piece into systemd 🤗

[ssokolow]

JSON is just fine for manual editing. I have no difficulty editing my VS Code config by hand. On top of the rich type system, there is a parsing library available, often included in the stdlib, for nearly every programming language.

1. You can also edit XML by hand but nobody would say that it harmonizes with existing UNIX configuration file conventions. TOML is better at that than JSON is.
2. TOML's type system is like JSON's but also adds a datetime type, so people hand-editing data containing dates don't have to manually mess around with human-unfriendly "seconds since the epoch" representations or typo-prone "timestamp as a string" representations.
3. While not included with stdlibs, there are also TOML parsing libraries available for tons of different languages. (The "v0.5.0 compliant" section of their wiki lists parsers for C++, .NET, Elixir, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, Python, R, Rust, Smalltalk, Swift, and Wren. If your schema doesn't need the features added in v0.5.0, the "v0.4.0 compliant" section takes that list and adds Clojure, Common Lisp, Crystal, Dart, Erlang, Fortran, Go, Haskell, LabVIEW, Lua, MATLAB, Nim, OCaml, Perl 5, Perl 6, PHP, Ruby, Chicken Scheme, Scala, and Shell.)

[aht0]

YES!
Fuck Unix! That thing is long dead, and the sooner everybody gets it the better it would be!

Next question being: Is Linux any better? It's nowadays pretty much 'buttboy' for commercial interests to do what they want to it..

[ssokolow]

YES!
Fuck Unix! That thing is long dead, and the sooner everybody gets it the better it would be!

Read Eric S. Raymond's The Art of UNIX Programming (it's free). I think you'll be surprised at how much you agree with despite it having been written 16 years ago, and how little of what you think of as "UNIX stuff" is actually a requirement. (And he, like many people, is talking about "Unix", the design, not "UNIX", the certification.)

Heck, the biggest thing that let UNIX compete so well over its ~50 year lifespan is that it was better than competitors like VMS at changing with the times as old use-cases waned and new ones grew.

[zoomblab]

Τhis does not solve my problem of having my own files mixed with all the files the system creates in my home folder. When I move from operating to operating I want to keep absolutely my own files and nothing else.

All in all this would be an interesting proposition, if it was a proposition. The way I see it Lenart decided how things should be done, went ahead and did it and by judging from history he is likely to get his way. And that happens friends because besides RedHat there are not Linux distributors strong enough and wealthy enough and determined enough to invest time and money in a serous alternative.

[timofonic]

Systemd is growind without any reasons. I do use computers.

It has one reason: Conquer the world.

So in essence you don't use computers at all.

Systemd is growind without any reasons. I do use computers.