Oy, that's disappointing, I hadn't heard that (and yep checked the website; the logo's changed... sigh). I guess I can dismiss NixOS from my list of possible linux distros. I thought Nix's approach was an intriguing idea, but the last thing I want with my Linux distros is maintainers sidetracked with politics. It means the distro itself takes second place.
Yet sometimes less is more anyway, and I've been using Void Linux recently. Feels like the linux distros I grew up with, just better.
Cool, glad it works for you, as I said, it is promising.
Others might be turned off before they get started. In any case, it's a distraction, and has no business in any open source project. Inviting politics in (if that is what the Nix team is doing) puts an upper bound on the distro's reach.
Yikes, that'a not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of politics. In fact, it's one of the last thing that comes to mind, and whitewashing the behavior of the NixOS community leaders as simply, "politics" doesn't do justice to what is described in the blog post.
Well of course I do. If a project openly states that they will ban me for my political beliefs, even if I talk about them on my personal website or X account, why in the world would I invest my time and energy in learning how to use it and also investing time into improving the project and submitting bug reports? I'm not a masochist and do not support people that openly hate me and my values.
That reminds me of an article where the author was like the most disastrous design choices in all of programming, was the NULL-terminated string. It's telling that no other language since C really does that.
yes, especially the scope and power creep, which is antithetical to what unix was all about. Which was doing one thing, and doing it well.
What started as a neat way to start servers in parallel, as systemd handles the sockets, now can control your home directory. Like what?
I don't want to think about it, just login and everything is there where and as I left it. I had this in college in the early 1990's with yp and nfs. However setting that up is hard on a dedicated network. Getting it to work with a laptop which might not even be connected to a network (as happened to me last night on amtrak in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota)
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.
I've been digging into this for years and it seems the consensus is simply RDP of some flavor. Mainly VNC derivatives and NX. NoMachine ticks all the boxes, it can manage spawning shells and passing audio and files. But I dunno, I just don't like it that much. It's not at all the same kind of magic that X forwarding is.
We had those terminal servers, but also full work stations that you logged into directly. x forwarding is magic when you can share/ use an expensive/powerful computer but most of the time the local computer is fast and cheap (these days a modern destop run circles around a then supercomputer)
Well, we had this at university. I think it's just running some protocol to sync user database (yp/nis/ldap/something) and amd to automount home dirs. You want to mount all home dirs on first access, not just who's logged in, unless you want to prevent people sharing files by Unix file permissions. Or mount the whole of /home, but then it has to go through one server.
Okay, but systemd can't teleport data. This could let you carry your home directory on a thumbdrive or such, but it's not a synchronization daemon. It kinda sounds like you just want syncthing or the like?
Roaming home directories are a goal of this project. It can work via home on a usb stick. I'm not sure how/if it works with network shares and usb both - something I want as I have several computers on my desk and lahtops I use for travel.
It would also work over NFS, which could have value.
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.
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.
> Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux.
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.
You could have been a little clearer, but the main communication problem is that I didn't know that was a problem that could exist so it was easy to not follow. After a few minutes of confused web searching, I found https://fedoramagazine.org/thunderbolt-how-to-use-keyboard-d... which appears to describe the problem and some solutions (that don't involve homed, not least because this article predates it). AIUI, the problem is that you have to log in so you can approve the keyboard; that might be a pain point with an encrypted root (albeit it looks solvable), but if it works with homed I struggle to believe that it wouldn't work with any other encrypted home setup. Mostly because that part of homed is mostly a thin wrapper of code and convention over existing stuff.
Thinking government can help is wrong to begin with. It can't, it can only get in the way. Perhaps electric vehicles and definitely smaller vehicles could've been more prevalent today without the CAFE rules. Other environmental rules prevent (or make prohibitively expensive, same thing) the mines in which rare earth metals for batteries for EVs are produced.
At least the federal EV mandates are gone now (my state's still exists though, sadly). That would've only driven up costs, meaning more people either would NOT drive EVs at all, or would be even more in debt then they are now.
The motivation of a bureaucrat isn’t the effectiveness of the policies they produce, but instead the political ramifications of those policies.
The safety minded “take no risks” at all approach has been if not popular, tolerated because it’s hard to argue against safety, even if the safety gains are dubious, and expensive. And so they keep their jobs.
Fast forward a few decades of this, and now nothing much new can be developed.
But of course the bureaucrats are “smart” so they’re never to blame.
Frankly they deserve the ire they get for being part of the problem. When is the last time they got rid of an ineffective rule in the EU?
Good time saver though, if you do.