[SOLVED] Migrate from systemd-homed to traditional user management

cloverskull · 2022-11-11 23:56:44

EDIT - See solution below.
Hey friends, I've been experimenting for a while with systemd-homed and have gotten frustrated with how long it takes various home related services to stop at shutdown/reboot as well as what I feel is a bit of a misleading indication of drive space available. I'd like to migrate my user back to traditional home setup and disable systemd-homed completely. Has anyone done this? Is there a lot of risk? And what is the process?

Solution:

Create a new user the traditional way, and make the new user have the same groups and shell (zsh in my case) as the user you intend to migrate. For simplicity, I called this new user 'newuser'.

Login as the original user, and from the user's home directory do

homectl with <oldusername> -- rsync -aHAXv . /home/newuser/

Then, chown that directory and all of its contents to newuser.

Reboot, and instead of logging in as anyone, drop to a tty and login as root (or newuser and then sudo su - root). Remove the original (homed) user

homectl remove <oldusername>

Then you can disable the systemd-homed.service. Follow the arch linux users and groups manual to change the username for newuser and then rename the home directory. You should be good to go.

Last edited by cloverskull (2022-11-12 03:22:39)

Slithery · 2022-11-12 00:33:25

Have never tried this myself as I've had no issues with systemd-homed but can you not just create a new user with the traditional tools and then copy your $HOME across?

cloverskull · 2022-11-12 03:18:24

Figured this out, it wasn't too bad honestly. I'll update the initial post with the instructions and mark as [SOLVED].

Arch Linux

#1 2022-11-11 23:56:44

[SOLVED] Migrate from systemd-homed to traditional user management

#2 2022-11-12 00:33:25

Re: [SOLVED] Migrate from systemd-homed to traditional user management

#3 2022-11-12 03:18:24

Re: [SOLVED] Migrate from systemd-homed to traditional user management

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