
Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change - gilad
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-home-directory-management-is-about-to-undergo-major-change/
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dsign
How much will this break Linux? Will we ever recover? Here are the problems I
can already smell from this:

\- SSH not working

\- Forced encryption, which will slow useful I/O work like compiling a project
to a crawl. Admittedly it says somewhere else that encryption will be
optional, but we have seen "secure by default" and patches like specter botch
the performance of computers where performance is at a premium. If opting out
becomes a PITA, it will cost billions of hours of collective time, as another
commenter suggested.

\- UID mappings. There are decades of code, systems and services built around
the status quo. The container images that I use to develop projects in my home
folder may not work anymore.

\- Mental effort. Now `/home/user` won't simply be a folder, but a mount.
Anything under `/home/user` that needs to be mounted somewhere else may or may
not work. Or may work part of the time, provided that one understands all the
nitty-gritty details of the mount mechanism and the mount order.

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
A big chunk of the article talks about SSH. Encryption does not dramatically
slow IO, especially with transparent compression in btrfs for example. In my
case on a r5 3600 and Arch Linux it has negligible effect.

------
paypalcust83
Systemd people are the problem: forcing everyone to change and break
compatibility for marginal-to-no benefit at the diffuse costs of billions and
decades of man-years wasted.

~~~
jakeogh
Gentoo. We didnt need to have the arg, you pick your init system.

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mongol
Something about the portability of the home directory (putting it on a USB
stick etc) must be missing from the article. It does not explain how that is
not possible today. Must be something about user ids, right?

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indentit
The lack of consideration for how ssh will work (authenticating with ssh keys
etc.) is a bit worrying, I hope they come up with a good solution.

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
I hate how we're stuck in backwards compatability with ssh. It'll never follow
XDG base dir specs for example. Many servers still use RSA. Can't really blame
anyone but man backwards compatability can be a pain.

