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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 -iand then getting the group added to /etc/group with
grep -E '^dialout' /usr/lib/group >> /etc/groupafter that, you'll be able to add your user to the group with
usermod -aG dialout pipeRight on the money, that's what I ended up doing. Thanks!
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.
Why can't we keep system config things in /etc? It's a method that works in unsurprising ways.
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.
That's really helpful to understand the caveats, thank you.
It's like when I run into some issue with how I've set up my system in NixOS and have to explain to a non-Linux user that it isn't Linux that's the issue but how I'm using an especially weird Linux lol