[gnfurlong]

Systemd-homed isn't inventing the idea of encrypted home partitions and fundamentally, what you're saying is that cron is incompatible with encrypted home partitions (or any other auto mounted home partition, ex: network mounted). The same is true for the concerns about ssh.

If you listened to the original talk from Lennart, you're really just giving examples of one of his major points. Because /etc/passwd wasnt flexible enough to accomodate arbitrary user properties, user configuration has organically spread out over time into all these "side car" configuration files. Some are scattered around /etc so not easily portable while others are in the user's home directory and suffer from exactly the scenario you've mentioned. One of the goals of systemd-homed is to add a portable, extensible format for a user record external to the home directory which would mean that systemd-homed rather than causing, could actually lead to a solution for the issue you've highlighted.