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Nearly complete lack of user management in KDE/Plasma

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    Nearly complete lack of user management in KDE/Plasma

    Revisiting and old gripe just to see if there are any new solutions:

    In 2016 "KUser" was removed from Kubuntu and currently "usermode" provides the user management interface in System Settings. It is woefully inadequate for even basic user management. For example, KUser allowed admins to change group membership, home directory, login in and user ID names, password, default console shell, etc. and also had Group management functions. We currently can only change passwords and names.

    Based on what info I can find, it seems the KDE/Plasma team dropped user management and shifted the responsibility for this functionality to the distro and/or DE development teams and Kubuntu has not fully addressed this functionality.

    The best (least annoying) options I have found are either installing the LXQT user tool found here or to install Webmin.

    It really smacks as similar to the many years worth of Ubiquity being, for want of a better word, garbage. IMO user management, like the distro installer, have a very high level of importance and shouldn't just be shunted off to terminal commands, some of which are not commonly known. What should take a few seconds to do - like adding a user to the "saned" group - becomes a dreaded task of web searching and hoping you don't forget the "-a -G" options in the terminal.

    Opinions or suggestions wanted...
    Last edited by oshunluvr; May 22, 2024, 06:34 AM.

    Please Read Me

    #2
    Unfortunately the current KDE Plasma 5 and 6 user management module in System Settings is kept as "simple" as the one in GNOME
    I can only guess that the developers think (and they are probably right) that the large majority of people (also those coming from macOS or Windows) are single users on a single user system who will nearly never use a second user account or even more users on their machines. And who will never have to add or manage further group membership.
    I would appreciate a much more refined/complex System Settings module with the same possibilities as one has in CLI, too - but someone will have to write it first (and for free that is)…

    I think the user manager lxqt-admin-user from LXQt is a good choice if you want to do this graphically in Plasma ATM. It is installable from the *Ubuntu repositories with the meta-package by sudo apt install lxqt-admin.
    Although this installs a lot of dependencies (in 24.04 half of the whole LXQt DE ) I would probably prefer this to the GTK ones from Xfce or Cinnamon.
    Personally I manage users in CLI only (no matter which GUI) - the only exception is the three-click user creation that does not need any additional group membership or anything special at all (e.g. for a simple test or maintenance account on a system I installed).
    Last edited by Schwarzer Kater; May 21, 2024, 05:43 PM. Reason: typos
    Debian KDE & LXQt • Kubuntu & Lubuntu • openSUSE KDE • Windows • macOS X
    Desktop: Lenovo ThinkCentre M75s • Laptop: Apple MacBook Pro 13" • and others

    get rid of Snap script (20.04 +)reinstall Snap for release-upgrade script (20.04 +)
    install traditional Firefox script (22.04 +)​ • install traditional Thunderbird script (24.04)

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      #3
      If one wants to use Webmin to manage users, download it from here and install it with sudo apt-get install -f ./webmin_2.111_all.deb

      Note this added 57 additional packages to my KDEneon install.

      Then to run it, in a browser URL bar, enter "localhost:10000", log in with your admin user account and navigate to "System > Users and Groups". There you will find ALL the needed functionality for User management.

      Please Read Me

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        #4
        Cockpit might be another similar tool but a bit 'lighter' - uses port 9090
        Code:
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        ​vs

        Code:
        0 upgraded, 54 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
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        Ummmnm....nevermid. It is about as bsic as Plasma's tool..sorry...nothing to see here....

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