No, you're not missing anything. I should've been clearer that I was talking about gnome-clocks specifically, which wants to use systemd both so that only syste

No, you're not missing anything. I should've been clearer that I was talking about gnome-clocks specifically, which wants to use systemd both so that only systemd needs the privileges rather than gnome-clocks itself and so that it can autostart gnome-clocks using the timer [1] even if gnome-clocks is down at the time (ie gnome-clocks doesn't itself need to keep the timerfd alive). In general, setcap'ing the binary will work fine. [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-clocks/-/merge_requests/146/diffs#8074a9cf0e5dac92ab12215f4a171b906100414d_0_79 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-clocks/-/merge_requests...