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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

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LeoPanthera·

One of the features they say they'll develop with the money is:

"Encrypt user home directories individually"

What does this have to do with Gnome, a desktop environment?

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I assume it has partially to do with integration with systemd-homed (which has support for it). Last time I tried it, it was kinda not working and when I recently checked online about it I found a few issues/MRs about it.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservi... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4644

GNOME has driven plenty of important system level integration initiatives. Because that's what you have to do when building a user experience.

I don't get the point of directory encryption. So much metadata (and entire data) leaks to other places. Just use full disk encryption?

It can be useful in environments with shared computers, or the home directory is streamed over the network.

It's also much easier to disable/enable encrypted home directories post-partition.

Does Ubuntu not already offer an option for that? I always encrypt my entire disk to I uncheck the encryption of the user (home?) directory that Ubuntu offers on installation because it would not make sense to double encrypt.

systemd-homed is built around the idea of portable users. You can dedicate an external SSD for your user and plug-n-play it in different machines. For a single machine it makes more sense to just dm-crypt the entire disk.

Will it have to use government supplied keys?

I’d like to introduce you to my friend, open source software.

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