Desktop users and group membership

[Adam Funk]

On 2014-07-07, Oliver Grawert wrote:

> hi,
> Am Montag, den 07.07.2014, 17:23 +0200 schrieb Niki Kovacs:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm currently fiddling with central authentication and roaming profiles. 
>> I have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS running on the server, and a mix of Ubuntu 12.04 
>> MATE and Elementary OS 0.2 (based on Ubuntu 12.04) on the client side. 
>> So far, NIS/NFS is working OK, users can authenticate centrally on the 
>> server and access their home directories.
>> 
>> Now I wonder what groups I can possibly affect the average desktop user 
>> to. On a Slackware system, for example, all my users were members of the 
>> following groups:
>> 
>> audio, cdrom, floppy, plugdev, video, power, netdev, lp, scanner
>> 
>> What's a reasonable choice for Ubuntu-based systems?
>
> technically you shouldn't need any of them anymore, they are there for
> legacy reasons, device access on ubuntu is granted via logind, policykit
> and udev ACL nowadays ... if you use a floppy i guess you might like the
> floppy group and i think "lp" is hardcoded in some userspace tools still
> "audio" is helpful if you want the user to have direct access to audio
> devices which in time of pulseaudio isnt actually necessary anymore.

I'm almost sure I fixed some issues on a 3-user 14.04 installation by
adding all the real GUI users to those groups, although unfortunately
I didn't keep notes about what I was fixing.