You're right that asking a user for a date is next to useless. However, that isn't a reason to not fight this stuff. Asking the user for the date is step one to getting people accept it. After that they'll point out that people were lying, and they'll need our government ID to verify (and link us to activity). It's all a step towards a surveillance network tracking every move you make on your computer.

1/1/1

every linux user is jesus confirmed

Come on, you know it's going to be 1/1/1970 most of the time.

https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/

They haven't fessed up yet that that's part of their plan. I expect to hear from them after they've passed the first half.

Iv not given a shit one way or another as well. But as a Californian I refuse to have this shit on my PC damn be what the law says.

Consider PCLinuxOS: they're an RPM-based mandriva (mandrake/conectiva) derivative with really great and wide compatibility in stacks without the 'modules' shitfest RH started after no one remembered what 'alternatives' was for.

They don't use systemd, but their installation is a bit shite as it's a "live CD" installer -- they pruned out the proper templatey install that mandriva has. But so far that's the biggest issue. If they can get off networkManager we'll be even better off, though.

Good news: this is not age verification. This is an optional DoB field on a user profile.

They bought a second computer so they can ask Claude for twice as much code.

Very fishy...

Fishy how? As in a state-level backdooring like was the case with XZ and Jia Tan or are you weary of something else?

This is a big weakness in FOSS communities, hell, in capitalist existence. People with resources can afford to spend their own time or hire someone else to focus on their contributions like a full time job while most honest contributers will be doing it during their free time because they need to pay bills and such.

While I think it's amazing that not only are 95% of Linux users 56 years of age, but they even share the same birth date!

Guilty as charged xD

I know the debate around systemd is going on for quite some time, I understood the basic reasoning behind it but I don't have the technical knowledge required to truly decide for myself, so I just didn't pay too much attention to it and followed what my distro of choice does.

The good thing about this "new development" is that it's not just a tech debate anymore, it has such wider implications that it'll be much easier for people to decide where to be.

i'm going to start dyeing mine so that people won't just keep ignoring me like some old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. lol

same thing with manifest v3, just some mega corp goon doing the work no one's asked for

Poettering is not with Microsoft anymore, though

Yes, and you can do the same thing to your child's non-root account. The point of the California law is to allow admins (parents) to do that.

Yes and that's fine and everyone freaking out is being dumb.

There are fascist governments demanding genital inspection for playing highschool sports and they're losing their shit over an accounts API returning an unverified age bracket!

So, declare your system users' birthdate as Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000 and get on with life.

You did care, or else you wouldn't be having this meltdown.

It adds an optional birthdate field to userdb. The desktop does not have to populate it. I'm honestly surprised this wasn't already a field in UserDB

FOSS isn’t as independent as we believe it is

Some parts are indeed sponsored by corporations, that's not a bad thing per se because financial support is important.

Problems arise when corporations push changes solely for their own interest instead of the benefit of the community, this PR seems to be that case.

Germany has effectivly the same law, active since december 2025, and I am sure more countries will intruduce such laws soon. Linux Distributions have to be compliant with this laws, if we like it or not.

Unfortunately, the internet at large has been embracing cuck behavior and capitulation for years.

They are genuinely excited to be a bunch of scared little bitches eager to please their masters.

I believe this only stores that information. It's not a system of declaring an age

The origin of inefficiency as resistance comes from people in concentration camps deliberately doing poor jobs at forced labour as a form of resistance. If you're posting on Lemmy right now you can do a lot more than inefficiency. The people who had to resort to inefficient slave labour as resistance could only dream of what you can do.

... can’t be validated in any way.

I feel like this will be a problem for the future.

Edit: another user already pointed out the "problem for the future" here.

Personally, I just don't like the taste of asslicking in my distributions. Time to change to a non systemd distro.

The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.

OK, but the law didn't even get written. That asshole decided to open up and deepthroat the boot before it even entered the room.

The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.

Is it going to give a choice, though? As more and more of these laws are passed, soon people will have no choice. Open-source software was supposed to be about freedom, and I see this as anything but that.

Ah yes, because systemd has a history of not expanding its functionality beyond reasonable scope

Yeah. I always use a fake date anyways so it’s not like it matters.

yep, it might be needed or not, let's invest valuable dev time into it, it will open the door for user tracking based on age bracket now at least, nobody asked for it, but let's do it anyways. Fuck Systemd for approving and merging this.

Or an alternate implementation of the API that fetches it to flag any programs that call it.

Can't any of us do it? We can just remove the bullshit and put it on codeberg?

Self reporting has long been honored as the gold fucking standard for honesty! How dare you sully that with your very discrete scrolling to a random year, and not even bothering to select a date! Our data mining overlords will be displeased.

They implemented part of the the low level works needed to implement birth date verification. Commercial distros like Ubuntu, RHEL and SteamOS might use it for law compliance. It'll very likely be as easy to bypass as it can be since no one really wants this.

Well, 2 out of 6 people have approved now and the person who requested for a review from Claude is Poettering himself.

Not sure I'm a fan of AI being used in the development of systemd, but at least for now it seems they don't want it to be built by stupid AI pull requests:

If you use an AI code generator such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Llama or a similar tool, this must be disclosed in the commit messages by adding e.g. Co-developed-by: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com and pull request description.

The quality bar for contributions to this project is high, and unlikely to be met by an unattended AI tool, without significant manual corrections. Always thoroughly review and correct any such outputs, for example ensuring it accurately follows Coding Style at the very minimum. Please do not fire-and-forget pull requests without any human intervention and review, as that will likely result in low-quality results that will not be accepted, and if done repeatedly, may result in the account being blocked. As with any other submissions, authors are responsible for doing due diligence and ensuring their submissions are compatible with the project's license as documented in LICENSES/README.md.

As a guideline, if someone notices that a contribution (code, issues, comments) was made with the help of AI, there was likely a lack of human review of the AI generated output.

I can see it being useful to invoke an AI review in addition to humans reviewing, just in case it catches something nobody else did.

grok is this bug free

SystemD isnt exactly a program but more of a group of projects, the only "core" SystemD software on most distros is the init system... Which you can run completely without SystemD's UserDB system (the part being talked about in the post).

Basically this means you as a user dont have to do anything but switch away from projects that depend on SystemD's UserDB (like Gnome), not SystemD as a whole

However if you do want to move away from SystemD as a whole you can replace your init system with another one, gentoo's wiki is a good starting point for learning a bit more: wiki. Personally I love using openrc but of you have no need to touch init files... Dont switch

Just use something simple with systemd. The Linux community is its own worst enemy, in inviting people to come to Linux because it's so simple and beginner friendly, then the trap snaps shut and they tell you to pick a distro and all you have to do is decide on either gnome, plasma or cinnamon, and between arch and debian and ubuntu, and between snap and Flatpack, between Vim, Emacs, nano, and micro, between Wayland and the other one, between systemd and violent self-fellagelation, and whatever you choose, make sure it's FOSS and exactly what the next person on the forum used and as pure as the driven snow or you'll be bullied, belittled, and trolled by egomaniacs, elitists, and gatekeepers until you fawn like a thrashed housewife who 'only gets hit when she fucks up', or you give up and install windows again.

Just use whatever works for you, makes your life easier, and avoid the Linux purity circlejerk. When it stops working for you, use something else. Go your own way.

If you don't know what systemd does and you aren't affected by this, use it. If there's closed source software you wanna run, run it. If you want to install a snap, do it. If you like using VS code, install it on your Linux, it works great. You will never be pure enough to satisfy the Linux community.

Most distributions use systemd but there are still distros and other unix-like operating systems that are using something else. However, they are not "user friendly" and will probably not be what most people are looking for.

Slackware uses its own init system and never used systemd but it has the reputation of being difficult to use. Gentoo also lets users choose between systemd and OpenRC. Alpine Linux uses OpenRC too. There's more than a dozen distros not using systemd, but again, probably not what most people want to use. It's also possible to replace systemd with OpenRC on some distros, but it possibly, probably, might cause some quirks.

Otherwise, there are other unix-like operating systems. Debian GNU Hurd also has its own init system but it's not using the Linux kernel, so it's a different beast. OpenBSD and FreeBSD also have their own init system, but not Linux. And AFAIK there's no such thing as modern gaming on those.

There are ways not to use systemd, but realistically speaking, it will probably not be worth it unless you're really militant about this. I started with Slackware at the end of the 90ies, I know how to compile a kernel, and tried GNU Hurd at some point, but I will not change something unless it's really implemented deeper into the general software. It's frustrating that the systemd devs are "collaborating", but we'll see what happens after a few rounds of updates.

Alt-init distros exist but it's only a matter of time before either they're screwed or age-gating goes down to firmware or hardware level.

I feel like the only way we can do anything about this is for us to have more money than the companies pushing for these changes, which is obviously not going to be possible... I'm not sure what else can be done.

Control what content you see and add some extra detail to fingerprint you.

If they can get this simple age verification done from everyone, it's not going to be hard to add "new requirements" in the future

It’s important to tell the Children apart because they are very sought after

They (politicians) are obsessed with control.

It's Meta pushing for this to avoid accountability and fines.

https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/

Nah this is more systemd bloat and certainly invites criticism. Other inits aren't even commenting, let alone complying.

Yea, fucking americans supposed democracy ruining the day again, thanks guys for freeing us all once fucking again

Then come the script kiddies hating on systemd for doing the actual work necessary for not getting linux banned in the "free" word and acting like this is some kind of gamestop organization action.

HolyC is the real C

btrfs. aside from useful things like on-the-fly compression and deduping, the thing has subvolumes; think partitions as folders, so you don't have to pre-size them. so e.g. your root (system) and home (user files and settings) are in separate subvolumes, which a) allows for easy backup/migrations and b) nothing stops you from installing a completely different OS (or several of those) in their respective subvolumes and then mount your home to each of those.

so you can have e.g. fedora and debian and arch, all on the same file system, using the same home, with all your shit available at all times and they don't interfere with each other.

Use a home dir on a separate partition and use nix or flatpak or some other distro agnostic package manager

You just setup with the traditional partitioning scheme, so / and /home on separate partitions. You can have as many / partitions as you like with different distros on sharing the same /home partition. You still need to install all the packages you use in each distro, but your setup, personal and config file are consistent and preserved across all the distros.

Has the lack of software ecosystem improved much lately?

I literally have the same plan if I ever need to.

As per the linked ticket, they are a story for a handful of user data. An XDG portal needs to store this stuff, and they are already integrated, so this is just to accommodate the other project.

Systemd has to do EVERYTHING

They drop a systemd-kerneld one day and drop the Linux bit altogether

I have excellent news for you

Though I haven't tested it myself.

Not at all for now. Its just about storing the birth date in a way that the system can use it.

The other user data is already stored in the userdb versions that nearly everyone who uses a systemd distro already has. You can check what data is being stored with userdbctl. On my system that looks like this:

userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)
{
        "userName" : "sky",
        "uid" : 1000,
        "gid" : 100,
        "homeDirectory" : "/users/sky/home"
        "shell" : "/run/current-system/sw/bin/fish"
}

Honestly this PR is a bit of a nothingburger. I'm not aware of any distro really using userdb to store data beyond what you'd store in /etc/passwd (maybe Ubuntu does?). The main value of userdb seems to be as a frontend so other programs don't need dedicated code to handle /etc/passwd, LDAP, etc. Notably GNOME recently eliminated their dedicated code in favor of just using userdb.

And Userdb doesn't really handle data validation at all. It enforces that you input a valid date after 1900, but that's kinda it. I guess you need root/sudo privileges to change the birthdate but that's not much of a hurdle for most Linux users.

Really this entire PR boils down to:

ALTER TABLE users ADD birthdate date;

Using Guix SD instead.

Real answer, NixOS is very tied to Systemd (the init part anyways). Removing it would amount to rewriting half of <nixpkgs/nixos>, and writing a bunch of extra service definitions for packages that are only supported on systemd. Also you'll have to reimplement UserDB (which is what this PR is for) to get GNOME (maybe also KDE?) to work.

Unfortunately not, systemd is tightly integrated into NixOS and an option for alternative backends would have non-insignificant overhead so they aren't going to introduce it. The next best thing is SixOS

forgive me if this is a joke, i'm not well versed in linux shit yet, but wouldn't that only remove systemd-boot?

At least for the California and Colorado laws, it is only attestation. But you also have to realize that, with how this law is defined, this only applies to parents setting up a account for someone <18yo.

The only reason I still have a Microslop account is Minecraft. I have to assume that's one of the reasons they bought it.

When did you start your opposition to systemd?

is perfectly reasonable for a private person with limited funds to fight a legal battle with

Are you saying corporations like Red Hat sponsoring the development of systemd are thinking of "poor private devs" of whatever distro when taking such a decision than impacts the majority of distros?

dude, can you send me a picture of your government ID? I just wanna see?

Everbody look at bro, he's glowing!

In the xdg-desktop-portal PR there is a very interesting discussion about how OS level parental controls probably should work:

The other way to approach this would be to turn it on its head, and instead of having a portal which tells apps what age the user is, instead have a portal which apps can query to tell them whether content which has a certain rating should be shown to the user.

gnome-software, AppStream and malcontent use the OARS ratings system for tagging content with what might be age-restricted about it. This has a mapping to a CSM age (which is international), and that has mappings to most countries’ national ratings systems, and is designed for web content as well as games and films.

Presumably an app would send a list of specific OARS tags (which exist for precisely this purpose) to the OS via xdg-desktop-portal, and the OS would respond by classifying each tag as acceptable or unacceptable. The app then is only responsible for not displaying the unacceptable content, and tweaks to the filters based on jurisdiction and new laws/amendments happens in a clearly defined place which is the portal implementation (which could be in an optional package, e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-content-controls).

Of course that system wouldn't comply with any of these new laws because they're just bad. Even ignoring all technical considerations, most of them have a ridiculously broad scope (or large uncertainties). They're very poor legislative work.