System76 engineer Jeremy Soller recently announced that he is working on adding support for an encrypted Home folder in the GNOME desktop environment for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
Last month, System76, a computer reseller specializing in the sale of laptops, PCs and servers preloaded with the Ubuntu operating system, unveiled its plans to create a consistent GNOME experience on all computers running Ubuntu 17.10, when the operating system be officially released in a few months.
Its CEO, Carl Richell, revealed some of the next changes that the company plans to make in this regard, in order to improve both the appearance and the functionality of the GNOME desktop environment, which will be distributed by default with the next version of Ubuntu.
Support for encrypted Home folder in GNOME
Although many were not too impressed by the new Pop theme that System76 wants to offer by default for Ubuntu 17.10 with GNOME desktop environment, some were happy to learn that KDE Connect will become the default tool to display to users notifications from your Android devices.
On the other hand, System76 also plans encrypt the Home directory by default on all new Ubuntu 17.10 installations with GNOME desktop while creating a new user.
Jeremy Soller has already released the corresponding patch for this implementation, which he has already tested on his Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) system, and apparently it works without major problems. If you want to try it, you can go to Launchpad to download the patches.
In total there are three patches, one of which will add a Switch "Encrypted Home Folder”In the GNOME Initial Configuration Tool. Another patch will add the same switch to the application GNOME Control Center.
Without a doubt, this is good news since it is something that will make the life of Ubuntu users easier when creating a new user, so that it is not necessary to manually activate the encryption of the Home folder.