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/
Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.
deleted by creator
🤷
In a few years, we may be smuggling in contraband Chinese RISC-V computers.
Only to be backdoored by the Red instead of the Orange.
Someone call Dr. Strange, he fucked up this timeline real bad.
The fact that this shit sound like a dystopian future trope…
I’ll never buy a computer that can’t be run without this shit. If that means I run what I have until it breaks and then never have a PC again then that’s what I’ll do
The last computer I bought (a couple of years back) was a decade old PC, the price was €10 or so. I needed to add RAM, SSD, and used it for a couple of years as a Fedora Workstation desktop. It was plenty powerful for most of my needs. I’m not too worried about it. I think I can survive on a machine like that.
Unless first worlders get out of their comfort zone and fight back, nothing can be done.
so much for making our own tech!
What if users are redefined as context? Now the is does not have users anymore. That’s not a ‘root’ user, it’s a ‘root’ context. And that’s non root context with supercontext privileges
Honestly the only way to fight all the corporate and govt data collection is to end the dictatorship of the Epstein class by overthrowing then. Until we can unite against them, they will continue to limit our speech in an effort to quell efforts to organize a resistance
it’s the only way i can truly think of. revolution feels so incredibly far away though.
there must be a way to resist this shit in the meantime.
By implementing it all in the most brain dead, user space writable fashion
The least effective way is whining on a Lemmy community about open source projects.
Go talk to your lawmakers, not the people complying with the law.
DRM writers love this too.
I was ambivalent about systemd up until now. If this gets merged I’m moving to a non-systemd distro. I do not live in California or even the USA. I do not want age verification garbage in my OS.
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.
There’s also kaOS
Good news: this is not age verification. This is an optional DoB field on a user profile.
It’s being added as a response to the age verification laws with the intended purpose to provide the age signal.
It’s age verification/attestation.
No. It’s a date of birth. You’re right that age verification comes next, but this is not it. Had this field been present before, none of this would matter.
Contact your representative, not your local FOSS maintainer.
Contact your representative, not your local FOSS maintainer.
They’re not a US citizen.
They also didn’t say they would contact the maintainers. They said they’d just change distro to a non-systemd one.
And you’re nothing but silly trying to act like this isn’t about age “verification”. We know it is, because it comes in response to the new california law
If you’re (or they) not a US citizen (or Brazilian) why would you care if they comply with local laws?
They stated that reason very clearly in their original comment. I suggest you read it if you want to know why.
Yes I can read.
Contact your representative
Right, so that they can ask if I’m stoned or stupid for asking them to affect laws in another country?
Then this doesn’t impact you in any form. (Especially since it’s just a DoB).
You can continue to whine but frankly I don’t see the point then.
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.
They bought a second computer so they can ask Claude for twice as much code.
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.
You mean they’re complying with the meta age verification at OS level lobbying?
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
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
Ofcourse the project run by a microslop employee wants to force this on almost every distro as soon as possible.
Poettering is not with Microsoft anymore, though
- get top recent commiters with https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pulse
- click on 1st link https://github.com/bluca and see https://github.com/microsoft in profile
Just 2 steps.
Yes Poettering isn’t at Microsoft but seems the person driving the project at the moment is.
Ah, nice catch
Why do the rest of us have to have this shit added in our systems just because some Yankees (and Brazil) passed some bills? My country has already said they won’t be doing any age verification shit. I’m starting to think there’s some big conspiracy here that FOSS isn’t as independent as we believe it is.
Don’t forget my shitty country in the process of trying to implement this too
echo "18+" > ~/.age_rcAm I compliant with California’s law now? Apps can use the POSIX API to access my age.
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.
As a teenager I was the only person in the house who understands computers. Naturally I was the admin. All this computer “jailing” is so insane to me.
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!
There are fascist governments demanding genital inspection for playing highschool sports
- That is already going on in the very same country we’re discussing.
- “Things could be even worse, so until things are just as bad as that, don’t complain or try to stop it from getting worse.”
If you yell that the everything is on fire, over an API that doesn’t do verification, it’s less effective when you yell the same thing over real issues.
That’s a poor analogy, because nobody is lying, saying things are on fire that aren’t.
We weren’t born yesterday—or at least I wasn’t. We know where this is going, and it’s folly to wait until almost the end before pushing back.
Ah, but how will we know you weren’t born yesterday?
Oh wait, I have an idea…
Push back to your lawmakers not the fucking open source projects that comply with the law.
You are really the dumb one for not learning from the past and for not seeing where is this headed once it’s kicked into motion.
Wow that’s an insane level of bootlicking, it was completely free for them to do absolutely nothing about this nonsense law and give the middle finger if asked by the US
I didn’t care before but it turns out the systemd haters were on to something for a long time, fuck these owners for even considering this and even locking the PR to avoid valid criticism, I hope all the contributors create a fork, jump ship and never let the previous owners commit a single line of code to it
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
Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.
Fucking hell. All he had to do was fucking nothing, the bastard.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/revoluciana-facing-fascism-sabotage
Sabotage sounds spicy. It sounds dangerous.
And yet, the underlying concept is simply this: inefficiency.
I told you last time, make every inch have its cost.
Resistance does not have to be violent, and that’s not something I’m advocating here. Resistance is the word no. Resistance is standing in place. Resistance is pushing.
Resistance is the albatross around the neck of your opposition. Resistance is the anchor that drags along the sea floor.
Here are some incredibly mundane but effective examples from the manual:
Make mistakes with purchasing travel tickets
Make engineering mistakes
Make long speeches and waste time
Act ignorant, or ask a lot of questions: if you’re not familiar with the concept of sea-lioning, you should really learn it
Take longer to do your work
Even if you’re terrified of doing more, this is simply a place to start.
You are someone and you have a responsibility to do something.
You cannot make it easier for the fascists to achieve their goals. You can’t do it today, and you can’t do it later if they claim authority. You must stand in the way of oppression.
This is fucking horseshit. I’m turning against fucking systemd , and I had no fucking opinion before, now it’s completely clear they’re a bunch of 1940s IBM wannabees.
EDIT : What a surprise, the fucker that wrote the PR works for IBM and “A Medical Malpractice company” and the one that merged it works for Microsoft.
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.
ok great. can you tie it back to the discussion please?
Conversations move through different topics.
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. It’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying. The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.
The answer to the PII issues is hence not restrictions in userdb, the answer is proper app sandboxing. And that even already exists in flatpak! It restricts access to $HOME already, and to userdb too! And that’s the way to do it!
I don’t use flatpak. I don’t like it. Linux is about choice and I choose not to use that.
Hence, just embrace app sandboxing! And if you come to me and say “hey, I run all my apps without sandboxing, but i want the birthday hidden anyway” then I can only say, your model is really really broken. Fix your security model first, then come back.
In the words of the great Linus Torvalds, go fuck yourself.
Has anyone even looked at the PR? Why is there such a big stink about adding an optional birthday field to a JSON schema? It’s opt-in and can’t be validated in any way.
That’s like saying OpenSSL is the thin end of an anti-encryption wedge because they provide FIPS compliant modules. Or complaining that it puts your privacy at risk when you generate an SSH key and it asks for your address.
The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.
Yes, the PR specifically calls out the laws as the reason for this change. The problem is BOTH the laws getting passed, and corporate interests complying in advance.
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 law didn’t even get written
https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1043
Current Status: PASSED
Ummm… what?
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4032221990
I’m Jeremy from System76. We are in talks with legislators and there are likely to be amendments to the age verification bills, as well as conflicting requirements in different jurisdictions. It may even be the case that open source operating systems are exempted entirely. I detailed this on the xdg mailing list here:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2026-March/014797.html
I have other concerns about this specific implementation. By relying on systemd, which is decidedly unportable to non-Linux operating systems, and not used across all Linux operating systems either, it will force at least one alternative implementation to exist. If these implementations end up having to collect jurisdiction specific requirements, that makes it much harder for compliance.
IDK, I read about this bullshit like last week, and it was always presented in future tense. I saw this post from Jeremy from System 76 today in the goddamn Git thread, so excuse me for not understanding the current state of the problem.
By implementing a mechanism that enables this law, it becomes exponentially easier for lawmakers to then make it mandatory (as many already have/are openly planning to).
Yeah, the problem is the lawmakers. But I don’t have enough money to control the lawmakers. The creators of free software should not actively helping oppressive measures.
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.
Looks like this is just for storing the data (birth date). Distros can use it and do age restriction or ignore it. Not a big deal imo. Its not like systemd does anything more with the date.
Yeah. I always use a fake date anyways so it’s not like it matters.
what a fucking bootlicker
I didn’t need one more reason to hate systemd
