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.
I’ll start off my comment with something everyone can agree on: the age verification laws absolutely sucks. It’s a surveillance law masquerading as a means of “protecting” children. It also completely undermines free and open source projects, and therefore, protected speech. The fact systemd had to add a
BirthDatefield is unfortunate, however, I would blame the lawmakers for creating the law that the developers of systemd now have to comply with.I’m okay with the implementation. It is an optional (meaning you have to add it yourself) field which only specifies the date of birth. It doesn’t seem to be at all invasive, nor does it attempt to “verify” it at the moment. Granted, anything is possible, but I don’t think there’s a good enough reason why systemd would EVER feel the need to add age verification. Before you say anything regarding corporations, please answer this: why would a corporation add age verification to a system manager their servers depend on? How will that profit them?
I get why people are angry, but I think this anger should be funneled towards the lawmakers pulling off nonsense like this. Fight those who are actively trying to take your rights away. Bullying software developers for complying to international laws will lead to nothing but hate.
Nah this is more systemd bloat and certainly invites criticism. Other inits aren’t even commenting, let alone complying.
Other inits aren’t even commenting, let alone complying.
This would be a fair point, if systemd wasn’t more than an init system. While a service manager (init system) is included, systemd is a system manager. OpenRC, runit, and other init systems do not need to comment because their only task is to mount the necessary file systems, setup the device manager, and start daemons1. systemd as a system manager not only needs to manage services, but it also needs to manage devices, logs, the hostname, etc.
Does this mean systemd is not bloat? Not at all, but it is not as fat as you think it is. Your system could honestly be fatter without systemd if you try to replicate everything it does with external applications. Does this mean systemd should also be justified to add an optional field for your date of birth? I guess I would say it’s weird on it’s own. However, given the context, I believe they are doing what they can.
Your system could honestly be fatter without systemd if you try to replicate everything it does with external applications.
Maybe so, but systemd’s bloated feature creep still leads to security vulnerabilities. Another systemd root access exploit was just discovered a couple of days ago.
Unfortunate. However, it seems that is snapd’s fault. Here’s the important part from the article:
Ubuntu automatically deletes old files from the /tmp directory after a certain number of days. During this cleanup, an important directory used by snap-confine may get removed.
Ubuntu configured systemd-tmpfiles to clean out /tmp after some days. That’s why the issue is only present in Ubuntu systems. Therefore, systemd was doing it’s job, and it just so happened to create the perfect conditions for a vulnerability in Ubuntu.
That is a fair point, actually. If there were a theoretical systemd-free Ubuntu it may just tell something else like tmpreaper to clean on the same schedule and create the same vulnerability.
Other inits are not relevant, because of their own choice to not do the job correctly last time they had a chance to
I believe those other init systems we’re in the right to, but that’s only because they are JUST init systems. systemd can because it doesn’t just provide an init system, it provide a suite of tools for Linux system management. Something like userdb would have to be implemented by another tool, where they could actually implement
BirthDateif they so choose to (and probably should for it’s continued existence).Yes, I agree. The problem is such things never appeared, so alternatives to systemd never became relevant.
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.
Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Fuck this PR.
A question I have that I hope someone can answer: how is the age check at the OS level verified? Is it just a trust issue that the user is putting in the correct date?
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.
This is exactly what I had in mind with my opposition to systemd.
Didn’t expect to be proven right so soon.
When did you start your opposition to systemd?
this new anti-systemd sentiment reminds me of anti-TPM and anti-SecureBoot sentiment
having TPMs and SecureBoot on Linux machines has only ever empowered device owners to ensure that the software on their devices has not been tampered with
there’s never been a case where these technologies were used against Linux device owners
likewise, I predict that Linux device owners may find the age field useful for certain opt-in parental controls, but we’ll otherwise look back on this and shrug at the extreme paranoia
how do you think this can be most effectively fought?
🤷
In a few years, we may be smuggling in contraband Chinese RISC-V computers.
The fact that this shit sound like a dystopian future trope…
Huh, we really do live in a cyberpunk novel…
Only to be backdoored by the Red instead of the Orange.
Someone call Dr. Strange, he fucked up this timeline real bad.
Email your legislators telling them that parents already have access to network block tools, these laws won’t stop the problem anyway (run through a vpn), they’re a free speech nightmare, they’re collecting more data on American citizens when America has data breaches losing data every few days, and Congress literally studied this twenty years ago and decided it wasn’t a good idea then, what makes it a good idea now?
uh…$? same reason the majority of US politicians vote anyway on anything put in front of them.
the only thing sacred in the USA is $
Largely true, though I think $ is a secondary consideration to some of the genocidal eugenicists, fundamentalists, supremacists, jingoist hegemons, etc.
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.
You won’t be able to afford RAM and SSD though.
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
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.
In my opinion, storing a date is pretty much irrelevant unless there’s a process that validates the supplied date, otherwise every Linux user was born on 1/1/1, if not, an administrator can “fix” that
Furthermore, that
systemdthinks that it’s the place to store such information is in my opinion beyond absurd.Who appointed that project the source of age truth in the Linux ecosystem? What discussion was there, who was consulted and where was the vote?
Exactly. This is a massive overreach, and it is crazy that Poettering is even considering merging this.
I would say the majority of objections to systemd pertain to perceived overreaches of the project (perceptions I generally share). So in that sense, it is kind of on brand.
it is crazy that Poettering is even considering merging this
You’ve, uh, seen systemd, right? Cmon; this is just one more section for the cancer to eat.
He thinks that systemd is desktop linux.
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.
I understand your point and agree that this is the thin end of the wedge.
What we’re doing here is discussing the phenomenon and I’m highlighting some concerns.
I believe that this is how you get a dialogue happening which will effect change, which is what we’re both advocating.
I think that age verification is about surveillance rather than protecting children and I think it should be fought at every level.
This is me contributing to that fight.
1/1/1
every linux user is jesus confirmed
Everyone knows Jesus was born one 0001-12-25
Is he dumb? It’s been almost 12 months since A. D. started. What was he waiting for
Come on, you know it’s going to be 1/1/1970 most of the time.
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.
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 Linux MX, Debian based, on their latest release they added systemd as an option, but you can choose sysv at first boot if you want, and that’s what will be installed and used.
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.Of course it does. This particular change may seem innocuous in itself, but the idea of compliance with ridiculous laws like this one, in one jurisdiction, being implemented in a project used globally will result in compromising everyone’s privacy/security, regardless of whether they are even subject to that law or not.
If anything, it’s more troubling for those outside the relevant jurisdiction, since we get 0 say on the laws, and have no actual reason to comply.
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.
Fishy how? As in a state-level backdooring like was the case with XZ and Jia Tan or are you weary of something else?
That memory surely also prompted this feeling. It’s just that Meta seems to be putting a lot of effort everywhere to push for this. Not so difficult to put, or corrupt, or push, people in dev communities and repos.
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 Meta’s age verification at OS level lobbying?
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
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
All those leap seconds…
Rick Astley’s birthday is 6th Feb 1966, just saying
76 years old from day law is passed to honor System76 for having some nuts and being proactive.
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.
A large part of the disagreement was never a tech debate. Systemd on a purely technical level had advantages, but the arguments were always about a concentration of functionality into a single critical program. Great while things are going well. Hell when it falls apart. That fear wasn’t totally based in technical reasoning.
There is indeed a philosophical part to it around the “do one thing and do it well”, but what you call “fear” is not an totally unfounded concern, in that it’s true that the more complex a piece of software is, the more complex maintenance also is.
But you need serious technical knowledge to fully understand everything that systemd does compared to sysvinit, what are the advantages of this new system and how much its complexity can actually affect maintenance (or not).
I don’t have that kind of knowledge, you could explain to me all the technical advantages systemd has but I wouldn’t be able to understand them, so I just trust distro maintainers in doing what they believe it’s best for their distro and I never considered the init system as a parameter to choose what distro I want to use, I just use what’s in the distro.
Now it’s different, because adding a field to comply with a moronic law pushed by Meta to avoid fines has truly nothing to do with technical reasoning, you don’t need any tech knowledge to understand that, anyone can.
It does not help that non insignificant amounts of systemd criticism comes from Lunduke and gang, often ignoring the actual technical problems with systemd and turning into culture war.
I don’t mean you, just my thoughts.
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
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.
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
- 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
I never cared about the systemd debacle, now I do. I don’t want that shit on my PC.
So, declare your system users’ birthdate as Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000 and get on with life.
Luckily for me, that’s not the only option, especially since I’m not US.
You did care, or else you wouldn’t be having this meltdown.
What part of “now I do” you didn’t understand?
You must be the most dramatic person in the universe, calling that a “meltdown”.
I am !
