The difference in user home directories access from live USB sticks

I created two users on my Mint 21.3 system: * user1 (1000) was created during installation * user2 (1001) I added later Both have their home directories in /home, with exactly the same drwxr-x--- permissions. Neither is encrypted. The problem is that none of the distros I tried as live USB sticks (Ubuntu and flavors, Mint, Fedora and spins) allow me to access /home/user2. Most but not all allow /home/user1. The only difference between the users is that user1 is an administrator and user2 is not. My question: why does it happen?