I don’t understand the obsession with systemd managing everything. I do not want it to manage my logs, NTP, DNS resolution, and I sure as hell don’t want it to manage /home.
systemd has done leaps and bounds for making Linux platforms look reasonably manageable and standardized.
As opposed to jumping between IRIX and AIX and Solaris? See Rosetta Stone for Unix:
* https://bhami.com/rosetta.html
* https://bhami.com/unix-rosetta.pdf
Wasn't one of the points of multiple distributions was to allow experimentation and allowing for different philosophies of doing things? If you're going to homogenize things what's the point of having multiple distributions in the first place?
> systemd has done leaps and bounds for making Linux platforms look reasonably manageable and standardized.
So I've gone from service foo start/stop (which also works on BSD) to systemctl foo start/stop. Yay! (Of course some distros use "ssh" and others "sshd", or "apache2" versus "httpd".)
systemd has done leaps and bounds
Right, which is why Windows home edition is managed via GPO and iOS exposes the same APIs as macOS. /s
Different operating systems are different, even if they share a kernel.
i'm not sure if that is what it does but I think that is a goal
Or… like iCloud? No on that last one, having Linux require some server seems to defeat the point. Why not a Mac then?
As mentioned, back in the day, you’d connect to a terminal server which would connect you to a random host. You’d login to that host (using a shared credential managed by yellow pages, maybe — this was pre-LDAP). Once logged in, something like mountd would mount your home directory from the NFS server and off you go.
Not a lot of these kinds of systems out there today. Curious how a modern one would be managed and secured.
My interest is actually in the opposite direction; I want a single machine with all home directories on its own internal hard disk, but where each user encrypts their home directory separately. That's doable other ways, but homed could be a nice way to do it that works out of the box.
Systemd kind of combs these all into one place so there's a single point of failure. Now there's just one of them, so it's DRY.
A single point of failure is… good?
(Or is your statement an example of Poe's law?)
The other “points of failure” you mention are all incredibly well-tested and battle-hardened.
Works becouse RH is or was main developping force in open source. Ubuntu or SUSE or Debian or EU are just joke in software development. And RH [management] goes rogue... Think: back to pre-POSIX UNIX wars...
I don’t run systemd at all, to be safe.
Meanwhile, I want to be able to mount my home directory on an external drive, and have it shared between systems without UID/GID hell.
And,
Have an encrypted home directory and boot the system and be able to enter my password with my keyboard which is connected to a thunderbolt dock during boot. Something which has been possible on Mac and windows for a decade or two.
Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux.
Criticisms of systemd just because “it doesn’t smell like Unix” is all nice and fine, but ignores real quality of life and security features it provides. If you don’t have these usecases, you’re welcome to continue to ignore systemd, but some of us actually want these feature.
It absolutely is not. [Full] disk encryption has been fine for... at least 15 years, probably more. Sharing a home directory requires consistent UID/GID, but that's not hard even fully manually (which is fine if you're just one person).
Yes Linux has had FDE on for a long time, but with traditional FDE using LUKS etc, you cannot use accessories such as a thunderbolt keyboard during the boot process to enter the password to unlock the disk.
Which is a problem if you’re like me and want to just connect your Linux laptop to a thunderbolt dock and use the keyboard attached to it.
A problem which systemd-homed solves.