State of GNOME OS and homed

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Last year, I’ve read A Desktop for All on Adrian’s blog, which outlines the idea to turn GNOME OS into a general-purpose OS.
As someone who already uses an immutable system with Fedora Silverblue I really like the concepts GNOME OS follows. Additionally, with the inclusion of homed for encryption of the individual user home directories, I really think this is a system I’d like to install on future devices for myself and my family.

However, as of now, GNOME OS is still a test platform, and homed isn’t fully implemented in GNOME. GDM for example can’t find a homed user on the current nightly state.

If we look at the goals “GNOME OS as general-purpose OS” and “homed for encrypted users”, where are the roadblocks which needs to addressed first?
Are they of a technical nature (so a developer could help out with them), or are they of a operational nature (think infrastructure, etc.)?

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where are the roadblocks which needs to addressed first

There’s a list of all the ongoing blockers and issues for homed at Teams / STF / homed · GitLab

Basically:

  • homed is mostly implemented and functional, but some stuff was pending review for a while and I started working on other things. Never ended up circling back around to it, to land the remaining patches.
  • The plan is to have someone circle back and bring the pending homed patches over the finish line, especially upstream in systemd.
  • Multi-user support is currently disabled with homed. There are limitations in the Linux kernel

Once homed integration is done in GNOME, GNOME OS will be the first to have it.

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Right, I see.

What exactly is the Kernel limitation that prevents multi-user support? I suppose it has to do with HomeD using encrypted filesystems for user data?

Also, are there issues regarding GNOME OS and HomeD with which a newcomer could start contributing with? I would like to get involved, but could use some guidance on what the architecture and plans around this are.

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What exactly is the Kernel limitation that prevents multi-user support? I suppose it has to do with HomeD using encrypted filesystems for user data?

Also, are there issues regarding GNOME OS and HomeD with which a newcomer could start contributing with?

Probably not, this is pretty low-level plumbing work. However, if you’re interested feel free to peruse Issues · Teams / STF / homed · GitLab and see if anything catches your eye

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