Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…
Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
I didn’t need one more reason to hate systemd
We graybeards tried to warn you about systemd but you acted as fools.
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
It’s so hilarious that the most recent thing that’s happened on this shitty PR is a request for Claude to review their code.
Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.
None yet
Time to move to Guix !
i think it’s really wholesome that a lot of 126 year old people use linux
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!
Yes, the Unix epoch is the obvious choice of birth date here
We should all agree on a common birthday, until operating systems enforce ID upload
you missed the joke I think: Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000,
UNIX timestamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
I never cared about the systemd debacle, now I do. I don’t want that shit on my PC.
You did care, or else you wouldn’t be having this meltdown.
What part of “now I do” you didn’t understand?
As usual, poettering is a piece of crap.
Y’all are making a mountain out of nothing. Adding a data field alone has absolutely no effect unless:
- Entering it is forced
- That entry is somehow verified (which would be the invasive part)
- The systems accessing userdb actually use it for anything (which would require it to be filled out and verified to be anything but performative)
As it stands, it’s a performative gesture to avoid law enforcement crackdown, which I think is perfectly reasonable for a private person with limited funds to fight a legal battle with. That doesn’t mean they can’t also fight that battle privately, but expecting volunteers to put their necks on the line over adding data field seems rather entitled to me.
If Gnome decided to implement age verification (beyond just “enter your date and please don’t lie”), using that field, the blame for that would fall on Gnome.
This is more like adding a field in the cookie of an adult website to store whether the user has clicked “Yes, of course I’m 18”, without even implementing the disclaimer for the user to click that button, let alone actual age verification.
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?
Red Hat probably could afford to go to court over those laws. Maybe should, too. Maybe just passively ignore them until someone drags them to court for it. But all of that would be independent of this change.
impacts the majority of distros?
And just what is that impact?
“Here, you have a space to write stuff down.” So what? If I’ll never read it or verify the contents, what difference does it make?
And just what is that impact?
That every distro will inherit a field containing a birth date, whether they want it or not.
“Here, you have a space to write stuff down.” So what?
That “stuff” is a personal information that not everyone is legally equipped to deal with. I’m EU and there specific laws protecting storage and usage of personal information.
Your "stuff"can potentially create more problems than the ones it tries to solve, assuming good intentions.
Everbody look at bro, he’s glowing!
?
Why would anyone on Linux, having free choice of all Linux OSes, choose one that actively compromises your privacy?
This is why Linux should never be a corporate, paid-for ecosystem. The nerds that keep all this shit running for free will not be interested in maintaining spyware OS.
Problem is, most distros use systemd, if they accept this implementation, distros will inherit it.
I don’t know what it would mean for distro maintainers to revert this change, but I guess it wouldn’t be easy.
I’m personally just happy sysvinit distros still exist, hopefully sysvinit won’t cave like systemd seems to be doing.
Very true, and this is a good argument for the importance of diversity in everything Linux.
The fact that there are distros not using it at least means there’s room to fuck off to those if this gets out of hand.
QUESTION: if I run my own system with local accounts, full root access, and no remote accounts… why should I care about whether systemd “MAY BE ABLE” to store someone’s date of birth?
Sounds to me like, for all I care, they could add fields for ethnicity, religion, d size, political orientation, colonic maps, or whatever else they want.
If it’s to build systems shared with underage family members, schools, or other public system… I personally DGAF.
If the whole story was the addition of this change with no other context, I’d agree. But if you read the PR description you’ll see its more than that. The laws in question are specifically called out. This suggests that whether or not the legal interpretation of compliance changes (the law could require more than just DOB entry, aka DOB verification with government ID), systemd is planning to comply rather than join the legal battle against these invasive requirements.
Yes, I get that they may want verification with government ID… but unless they do it at a firmware level, anything above a FOSS Linux kernel on my own unlocked hardware, is fully under my control.
So far, it sounds to me like “age verif theatre” as applied to single user “jailbroken” systems. If they added this on a locked down Android system, as a requirement for network access (note: this is an actual proposal being floated around) then that would be of some concern… but systemd? 🤨
Just write a shell script that changes the birthday every few minutes lol
They want to store the actual birthdays (not just a boolean stating it complies with an age bracket). And using claude to review PRs… fucking systemd
This is some sick early April Fools thing right…? RIGHT?!?
Something feels fishy… The user who made this pull request has more than doubled his contributions to various repositories since January (from 20–400 to more than 1100), and this is his first pull request in the systemd repo.
Fishy how? As in a state-level backdooring like was the case with XZ and Jia Tan or are you weary of something else?
They bought a second computer so they can ask Claude for twice as much code.
