@oclsc uh? /etc/nologin is long obsolete. it's located in /etc/ which we have to assume to be r/o in the general case, in particular in early-boot and late-boot, where the files is touched. It was moved to /run/nologin more than a decade ago, to clean this up, since it's volatile, and modified on every single boot+shutdown. Making changes to /etc/ for a purely *runtime* param was just super broken, and that's something we fixed. So no, this is not chaos, there are reasons. Thank you very much.