From homectl:
Home directories managed by systemd-homed.service are usually in one of two states, … when “active” they are unlocked and mounted, and thus accessible to the system and its programs; … Activation happens automatically at login of the user
What does ‘login’ mean? For example, I created a user and tried to su -l test, but I got: cannot change directory to /home/test.
What is required to ‘activate’ a homed directory if not a login shell?
That will handle all the PAM stuff as if you actually logged in.
You can also ssh into localhost as the user if you have that set up