😃
Even if “isn’t that bad” were true, it’s hardly a stunning endorsement. I wish Linux aimed higher than “not that bad”, but it always seems to hit “only some bits are broken”.
Looks like you’re on Fedora Silverblue (or other Atomic version). This is happening because the system groups are in /usr/lib/group rather than /etc/group and this causes the issue you’re seeing here. You can work around it by getting into a root shell with something like
sudo -i
and then getting the group added to /etc/group with
grep -E '^dialout' /usr/lib/group >> /etc/group
after that, you’ll be able to add your user to the group with
usermod -aG dialout pipe
Is etc the mutable part? Would you have to do this again to add more users after a reboot?
/etc is writable, so no reboots are required. That said, /etc is treated in a special way and each deployment will have its own /etc, based on the previous one.
So if you make changes to /etc then revert to a previous deployment, your changes will be reverted as well. But if you make changes and upgrade (or do whatever to create a new deployment), your changes will bu preserved.
Is that considered a feature for some reason? That seems objectively terrible.
No, it’s a side effect of how everything’s handled by rpm-ostree currently, and it’s on the list of issues to be fixed.
I’ve had this one recently.
It gives you an error message, but creates the group anyway.
(some!) FOSS developers when you open an issue about it: works for me. Closed
(Disclaimer: I know not all foss devs are like this. Especially kde devs are awesome.)
If you want to add an existing user to an existing group, use:
usermod -a -G <group> <user>
