Well. How frequently do you update your user record in /etc/passwd? I mean, if you do this a million times per second then maybe your are doig something wrong, no? I update my user record maybe every year when I update my password, but if you do that once per ms then uh oh

Given that the whole system is targeted for laptops, this seems somewhat obvious and does not seem to be something you need to measure?

The worst thing I can think of is classroom environment - and even that would be at most 1 update per hour, which is pretty infrequent in the context (the update frequency needs to be much bigger than the clock skew, which is normally under a second)

And even that assumes that each record is updated every time user logs in (since each record is stored separately). In practice, records could be added or removed to the system, but the actual modification will be pretty rare - once initial setup is done, it will be only periodic password changes.

In cases where they are, you're probably using a central account management system like ldap anyway.

Is this difficult to believe, do you delete users hundreds of times a day ?

I don't on my personal laptop, but my workplace's wacky automation does on my work laptop, and school and library automation definitely does on shared workstations, including laptops.

I get that that's the problem of the automation, not the daemon, but I'm curious about who exactly is representing users when the people running a project state things like that so unequivocally, and if those users are just excluded from any benefits from a system like this because fuck 'em.

Well he is 'reinventing' home directories as an independent concept. This storage artifact could be updated frequently and over the network. The concern may be insignifcant until this homed feature has its limits stretched.

That quote s about user record - full name, password, expirations, limits etc.. how often do you change this?

It does not apply to user files, there is a completely different mechanism for them