As you eluded to, the problems this is trying to solve include better integration/less rough edges with enterprise authentication (AD and the like), encrypting home directories, and making home directories and user accounts more portable. Anyone that does desktop fleet management will find a lot of stuff to be excited about here.
What do you do if you've left files on your desktop at home/work and need them from work/home?
Im personally curious to see how this works with a tool like Syncthing
Microsoft and Google do this because they make money out of monetizing their users. What's systemd's excuse?
As far as USB goes-- can you suggest a currently manufactured _good_ usb storage device? I've found myself scrounging for old ones because anything currently made are unreliable, slow (in spite of amazing performance claims), or usually both.
This doesn't really make sense as a response to comment mentioning Syncthing which works with any backend, including your other machines.
> What's systemd's excuse?
Systemd's excuse for what exactly?
Who do you think is putting the resources (manhours/money/etc) into mainlining this crap into Linux? It's the corps. Add Intel to the list.
For now. Until GNOME pulls it in as a dependency.
And also, this is just the default, the mechanism is general, how to do this unlocking can be done in many ways by other people who want to use these tools.
Is this really so common as to deserved two questions marks and an exclamation point? As one datapoint, if I've left files on my desktop at home that I need from work, I get fired.
Is it what most "normal people" do? Of course not! Most normal people buy a spyware 'smart TV', roku, or some other proprietary appliance. So why the hell should the common habits of the general population be considered? If their habits are to be the guiding principle of the linux desktop, I'll soon have no reason to use the linux desktop.
Incidentally at one of my former (FANG) workplaces, each developer was given a RHEL workstation and a windows or mac laptop. Using ssh from one's laptop to access the workstation while in meetings, working from home (including oncall in the middle of the night), etc was common and permitted. This is not as crazy as you seem to think.
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/homectl.htm...
> Takes an RFC 7512 PKCS#11 URI referencing a security token (e.g. YubiKey or PIV smartcard) that shall be able to unlock the user account. The security token URI should reference a security token with exactly one pair of X.509 certificate and private key. A random secret key is then generated, encrypted with the public key of the X.509 certificate, and stored as part of the user record. At login time it is decrypted with the PKCS#11 module and then used to unlock the account and associated resources. See below for an example how to set up authentication with security token.
Key hierarchy management can probably be delegated to an external system.
In fedora, at least, it requires only three lines of configuration changes (adding the pam hooks, and setting up the mount point in the pam_mount config).
What if your password is in LDAP, and you change it the OpenLDAP back-end? Or if you have OpenLDAP talk to AD (via SASL) for password checks, but the rest of the GECOS & group is in LDAP? Is Kerberos covered? How is NFS handled? Automounts?
Doing a ^F I find no mention in the man page of either LDAP or Kerberos.