At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin 20-22 September, Lennart Poettering proposed a new extension to systemd, systemd-homed.service. A video of his session can be downloaded from media.ccc.de with accompanying slides [PDF].
In his presentation, Poettering outlines a number of problems he sees with the current system, like /etc needs to be writeable, UIDs need to be consistent across systems, and lack of encryption and resource management.
His goals with the proposed solution are migrateable and self-contained, UID-independent home directories with extensible user records that unify the user's password and encryption key; LUKS locking on system suspend; and Yubikey support.
He identifies a number of problems this new idea could cause with SSH logins, disk space assignments, UID assignments, and LUKS locking.
He plans to introduce JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface and to a certain extent are convertible to and from existing formats. The home directories will be stored as LUKS-encrypted files that will be managed by the proposed new service, systemd-homed.service. The system integration will be supported by pam_systemd and systemd-logind.service.
It will be interesting to see how the world responds to this new take on systemd's ever-increasing encroachment of Linux.
... and lastly, this story is brought to you from a systemd-free laptop.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:16PM (2 children)
Alsa supports (since forever) setting up a software mixer, if your hardware does not natively support this. You don't need pulse audio to achieve this.
It is a bit arcane of a config, it you want to set up from just docs, but there are tons of examples around, if all you want is a mixer, or just a mixer with a volume boost, etc.
Since Alsa came out, I have never seen a crash due to Alsa.
Personally, I don't now, and didn't understand, at the time, why Linux created Alsa, instead of just improving OSS.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @01:01AM
I'll admit, I do miss being able to cat .wav files to /dev/dsp
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @01:02AM
Same reason why git came into being: Hannu Savolainen wanted to make money off of OSS, and provided only a crippled edition for Linux.