4 ms·

Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change

24 points by gilad 6y ago

paypalcust83 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Gentoo. We didnt need to have the arg, you pick your init system.
indentit 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > I hope they come up with a good solution. Narrator: They won't. :)
mongol 6y ago
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?
dsign 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

24 points by gilad 6y ago

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 6y ago
Gentoo. We didnt need to have the arg, you pick your init system.

indentit 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
throw0101a 6y ago
> I hope they come up with a good solution. Narrator: They won't. :)

mongol 6y ago

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?

dsign 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.