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 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.
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.
Enter Password: ********
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😑
If you want to add an existing user to an existing group, use:
usermod -a -G <group> <user>
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.)
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”.