accountsservice .face icons/avatars do not work out of the box on NixOS

[nh2]

Issue description

I see that on NixOS 19.09 the line Icon=/home/niklas/.face was created by default:

% sudo cat /var/lib/AccountsService/users/niklas
[User]
Session=none+i3
XSession=xfce+i3
Icon=/home/niklas/.face
SystemAccount=false

However, it doesn't load my avatar in the login screen if it put it in ~/.face, because lightdm gets permission denied:

openat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/niklas/.face", O_RDONLY) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

This is because lightdm (display-manager.service) runs as the lightdm user and the default permissions of a NixOS home directory are 700, so it can't read any files within.

What can we do to make avatars work as expected in lightdm (and perhaps other display managers)?

[nh2]

Perhaps related: #73976

[worldofpeace]

I don't know why this uses ~/.face as the default. And this will actually be the case with permission denied for every display-manager that uses accountsservice for this (they all run as a separate user). If you do the dbus method call for example,

dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Accounts --type=method_call --print-reply=literal /org/freedesktop/Accounts/User1000 org.freedesktop.Accounts.User.SetIconFile string:'/home/worldofpeace/.face'

it internally creates a copy just for accountsservice at /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/worldofpeace, and IconFile property now has this value.

[worldofpeace]

I actually noticed this same issue a few days ago and just did that dbus-send command (even found it in my shell history).

[worldofpeace]

Still not sure why the property stays .face when it should still make a copy of it and use this

• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/blob/master/src/user.c#L136

I'm betting just setting an IconFile with whatever program will produce the expected behavior.

[stale]

Thank you for your contributions.
This has been automatically marked as stale because it has had no activity for 180 days.
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[nh2]

still important to me

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[nh2]

still important to me

[SeraphyBR]

Also important

[Niols]

Also important

[nova-nowiz]

I have the same issue.
I'm willing to make a pull request but how is this file generated?
Would someone here know who to ping?

[dmedinag]

still important to me too...

[Aproxia-dev]

seems like the easiest way to get user avatars running is by setting users.users.<user>.homeMode to "755"

also in case someone here wants to have declarative avatars then you can simply just use home manager and set home.file.".face".source to a path to an avatar and it should do the trick

it's a workaround, and it's certainly not optimal, but it works great and it's super easily reproducible!

[musjj]

A declarative way to handle that dbus-send command would definitely be great. Can this be handled with a NixOS module?

[mobsenpai]

[Off topic]
Since I stumbled upon it myself. Is there any plans or solutions.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/setting-the-user-profile-image-under-gnome/36233/1