Portable Linux home directories soon™

The problem: The current Linux home directory system has aged poorly. This original foundation of Unix system has gone mostly unchanged for decades. Though some organic growth has occurred over the years, the lack of structure has created quite the mess. The masterminds behind systemd team have taken on the home directory challenge and their proposal looks fantastic. To truly understand how exciting this proposal is and how it will shape the future of Linux, you need to know a bit about systemd and the team that created it.

Systemd is 10 years old! The old init system had been a stalwart since ancient Unix times and though a few recent projects attempted to replace it, Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers at Red Hat were successful with systemd.

Early on there was a significant amount of hatred of systemd - check out https://nosystemd.org/ for a great example. Virtually every major distro has adopted systemd, but there are still those who dislike it. Systemd may be much better but change is always hard.

Lennart Poettering is an extremely talented engineer and acts as the lead maintainer for PulseAudio and Avahi which dominate the distros for sound and network service discovery. When Poettering sees a weakness or problem within the *nix environment, he develops a replacement and spreads it around the world.

This brings us back to linux home directories. The whole system needs an overhaul: encryption is generally not recommended or tacked on as an afterthought, UIDs are ancient and unneeded, and everyone tacks on their own implementations haphazardly leading to accounts-daemon or pam_limits or even ldap/active directory configuration.

If my excitement isn’t obvious already, I should tell you that the outcome will be awesome. The first goal will be portability: your entire home directory can live on a USB stick which requires everything be inside the home directory. Even more interesting is that AppImages can be implemented at the same time leading to significantly easier linux desktop system administration. Each user can have their own applications in their profile and move easily between skeleton machines. The USB key could also serve as a password manager and FIDO2 equivalent.

Using a USB stick may have other cool uses but it isn’t the only option: NFS, BTRFS subvolumes, fscrypt, CIFS, and LUKS are also viable. LUKS may actually be the front-runner given it’s comprehensive feature set, especially its standard on-disk-format that allows compatibility between distributions and secure management of multiple passwords.

Have a look at this great video by Lennart Poettering explaining the proposal in greater detail: