Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change | Hacker News Reader

Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change

techrepublic.com

24 pointsgilad8 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

> I hope they come up with a good solution.

Narrator: They won't.

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