# Experienced with systemd-homed or other encrypted home?

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/experienced-with-systemd-homed-or-other-encrypted-home/63516
**Category:** Help
**Created:** [April 26, 2025, 11:36pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/experienced-with-systemd-homed-or-other-encrypted-home/63516 "2025-04-26T23:36:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![TLATER](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/tlater/32/4257_2.png) [@TLATER](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/TLATER)
#### Post date: [April 27, 2025, 6:05am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/experienced-with-systemd-homed-or-other-encrypted-home/63516/2 "2025-04-27T06:05:12Z")

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> [@BoredSquirrel](#):
>
> I heard that it might interfere with home-manager (as homed also does some management stuff?).

Not exactly. systemd-homed’s fundamental concept revolves around sharing your home directory between hosts; the fact that it can also encrypt it is kind of incidental. That’s of course _really_ weird when home-manager comes into play.

Since home-manager deploys actual software into the home directory (or rather, symlinks to binaries in `/nix/store`), it will not _actually_ be portable, which goes against systemd-homed’s design. So the two are a little at odds, but if you use your home directory only on one system, you _probably_ will not run into any issues with this.

home-manager in turn is generally not designed around systemd-homed, you may find user services - and in fact just every day applications - don’t like having their filesystem suddenly unmounted. In fact, if you install your lock screen with home-manager, that may be catastrophic, so your usual WM setups might not entirely work as expected.

I’ve experimented a bit with it. It’s practically impossible to switch an existing host to it, since it requires partitioning considerations (even if you’re using btrfs, while you can use systemd-homed, you can’t get an encrypted home directory). On new hosts I found it a bit cumbersome to adapt my current desktop setup to it, and I didn’t like having a weird floaty UID. Personally I’ve decided to just stick with full-disk encryption at least until [the full trusted boot story](https://0pointer.net/blog/brave-new-trusted-boot-world.html) becomes feasible, without that the use case for it is a little too narrow IMO.

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