Converting Existing Users to systemd-homed managed Users
Traditionally on most Linux distributions, regular (human) users are managed via entries in /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group and /etc/gshadow. With the advent of systemd-homed it might be desirable to convert an existing, traditional user account to a systemd-homed managed one. Below is a brief guide how to do that.
This is a manual process, and possibly a bit fragile. Hence, do this at your own risk, read up beforehand, and make a backup first. You know what’s at stake: your own home directory, i.e. all your personal data.
Preparations: make sure you run a distribution that has systemd-homed enabled and properly set up, including the necessary PAM and NSS configuration updates. Make sure you have enough disk space in /home/ for a (temporary) second copy of your home directory. Make sure to backup your home directory. Make sure to log out of your user account fully. Then log in as root on the console.
Have a look at your existing user record, as stored in /etc/passwd and related files. We want to use the same data for the new record, hence it’s good looking at the old data.
