this was done with manjaro xfce.
so i went through the process of connecting to an ad in order to have centralized authentication (among a few other things that may be ‘good’ for). but being a laptop i want to make sure that the pinebook pro can still login as an ad user when it isn’t connected to the same network. this seems to work with the common settings found on samba.org which explains how to configure pam and smb.conf to work this way.
what i noticed though is that when i am off the network there is a long delay when trying to login as a cached ad user. i need to investigate this more but it is incredibly annoying. maybe i might move over to sssd but sssd seems a little underbaked in manjaro/arch. it is far easier to configure in debian or ubuntu. manjaro stock image repos are also missing realmd which i guess is a thing. i’ll update here if i find anything that can fix this.
just a note: manjaro instructions are the ‘old school’ way of doing it where you need to set up kerberos, samba / winbind, and pam in order for it to function. some people said they had success with sssd but i didn’t bother with it yet since old school method works for fbsd and it is best to keep that fresh.