Question about the default group name "users"

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I had a Tumbleweed installation on my computer for a couple of years.
Now having an update from KDE5 to 6 i did a clean install on a free partition.
Nice, clean OS, good for the coming years.
But I have a question about username and default group.
In the old install every file that I made was under my username and the group was always “users”.
The old files still are

But in my new install the default group is the same as my username.
I googled and found out that this was usual practice in most distributions.
Everything works, but for peace of mind is this a change in the Tumbleweed policies, or have I screwed something in the previous install.

2

@nietgiftig Hi, no it was a transition awhile back, nothing borked :wink: I had a mixture and just changed to my username slowly and carefully…

3

Thanks for the answer
So you changed your existing files to the new group name?
I ask this because it is amazing how much changes you make in configurations in the years gone by.
But also I used my existing thunderbird data for the new install.
Some files in the thunderbird user data have now the new group name, but others the old one.
And that is the same for other programs from which I used the old data.
I wonder if this will give me trouble in the future.

4

@nietgiftig it shouldn’t, both groups should work fine. New files should create are username:username?

5

Yes they are.
Thanks

6

To be consistent, all files in the user’s home subdirectory can be changed to the new group using the chown command. Only takes a few seconds to complete.

7

@nietgiftig:

Searching around for a “What’s been changed now?” answer, I almost drew a blank –

There’s absolutely no mention of a default user group …

But, on searching further –

There’s a mention of the “USERGROUPS_ENAB” variable in ‘/etc/login.defs’ –

       USERGROUPS_ENAB (boolean)
           Enable setting of the umask group bits to be the same as owner bits (examples: 022 -> 002, 077 -> 007) for
           non-root users, if the uid is the same as gid, and username is the same as the primary group name.

           If set to yes, userdel will remove the user's group if it contains no more members, and useradd will
           create by default a group with the name of the user.

Aha!!! –

  • Here on Leap 15.5 –
#
# Enable setting of the umask group bits to be the same as owner bits
# (examples: 022 -> 002, 077 -> 007) for non-root users, if the uid is
# the same as gid, and username is the same as the primary group name.
#
# This also enables userdel(8) to remove user groups if no members exist.
#
USERGROUPS_ENAB no

I guess that, with Tumbleweed it’s been changed to “yes” …

In other words, it seems that, the industry is changing to “For each and every human user login, that user shall have a personal unique group – also on multi-user machines and, in multi-user environments.”

For commercial environments, it possibly makes the system administration tasks a little bit easier – when an employee moves from a given department/group to another, the administrator only has to assign that user to their new group without changing the group assignment on the files in the user’s personal login directory …

8

Thanks for this comprehensive answer
I am glad that I (without knowing) adhere to the standard :smile:

9

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