[ale] for all you systemd haters...

[Alex Carver]

On 2018-02-16 13:07, Solomon Peachy wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 12:41:15PM -0800, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>> What exactly is logind supposed to handle?  I've already searched
>> multiple times and most sites regurgitate the manual without really
>> discussing what it's supposed to be doing and how it's different or
>> better than other implementations.  I've not come across anything that
>> explains it well.
> 
> Logind manages user sessions. It ensues that when a user logs out all of 
> their detritus is cleaned up properly, or that if you switch to a 
> different user then appropriate permissions are set up and revoked -- 
> this can even extends to stuff like network authentication, which may 
> require per-user authentiction.

Now currently a non-systemd machine tracks what belongs to whom, right?
I can pull up a list of PIDs and their owners (top already can do it) so
in theory I should have always been able to clean up behind a user even
if unceremoniously with a giant killall.  So that part isn't new as
described by some of these sites.

Permissions for the network is interesting.  Network authentication I
can see since that currently would require some glue logic to pull off
(like feeding current environment to wpasupplicant or an 802.1X EAP
interface).

> 
> It also (for all practical purposes) made multi-seat Linux systems 
> feasible; that is a single box with different users simultaneously 
> logged in using different sets of displays/keyboards/etc.  Granted, 
> other things like rootless X (via KMS) were also necessary, but logind 
> tied it all together and finally made it work.

But isn't this what thin-clients did ages ago?  You had a keyboard,
mouse, local GPU, local display manager and everything else ran on the
central machine.  Some older versions of Windows had that and I remember
thin clients for using X as well.