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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

Why not use systemd user units [0]? You can drop service files under `~/.config/systemd/user/` and enable them to be launched at login with `systemctl --user enable foo`. This is how the Crankshaft plugin loader autostarts itself on the Steam Deck [1]. It's published as a Flatpak [2] which you can install and update from SteamOS's built-in Discover software manager - on first run, the Flatpak drops the service file and enables it.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd/User

[1] https://crankshaft.space/docs/usage/autostart

[2] https://flathub.org/apps/details/space.crankshaft.Crankshaft

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Probably because Tailscale needs to manipulate networking hence needs root, so user units won't work easily.

systemd user-scoped services are great for other software though, especially running syncthing to sync game saves between the Steam Deck and a PC

Also great for running an SSH Agent, since they aren't coupled to some magic invocation in some bashrc but will always be started when the user session starts and cleanly terminated when you log out (or linger if you set that up)

Holy shit, that is an incredible idea!

Here's a sample:

https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/dotfiles/tree/c0bf9296c6ca8661...

Note that the ordering is important so that `SSH_AUTH_SOCK` is passed down to other services.

You can order them using user targets.

Ie, create a ssh-agent.target and have the default target depend on it.

Now your ssh-agent is guaranteed to be online when the default target comes up.

His method already does that. Creating a target for a single service is very much overkill. Though creating a target like setup or pre-default and putting in there might be a fine idea if you have other services you want to run that way.

But, since the unit is already setting a fixed path for the agent, I would just put that path in my .profile and call it a day. Having systems do environment variable injection seems too fragile to me, especially for static variables.

I mostly do the injection to keep EVERYTHING related to the agent in a single file.

But yeah, `environment.d` or `.profile` would be simpler. I mostly opted to keep everything in one place.

This isn’t entirely accurate, Tailscale works just fine in userspace networking mode[0]. It’s a bit of a faff to setup, but it works.

[0] https://tailscale.com/kb/1112/userspace-networking/

The main disadvantage about userspace networking in this case in particular is that SMB mounting in the kernel can't use it.

Tun devices need root.

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