Comment # 5 on bug 1086804 from Thorsten Kukuk

(In reply to Marguerite Su from comment #4)

> The error message you provided is of course not fake. So I want to examine
> the service (maybe) to make sure we do have a user without HOME in some
> situations.

This usual happens, if you do automatic updates from a systemd service, e.g. a
timer.
systemd service is calling directly zypper up/dup, which installs the RPM,
which runs fonts�config in the post-install.
Or systemd service is calling a script, which calls zypper, ...

Or something like salt is calling zypper.

Or you boot by DVD to update the system with YaST.

So every time zypper is not called by an user/admin on the commandline, there
is no HOME set.