Lots did. There are about a dotzend forks for this explicit purpose.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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I can see it's just an optional text field but the ick isn't optional. It's leaning towards submission in comparison to resistance. I'm hoping such laws get repealed, rather than spread.
- Fork a project that you have a problem with;
- Write a strong worded manifesto;
- Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
- Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
- Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.
Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.
Yes, but what's wrong with this? If you gather engineers that are capable to maintain it - what is the downside? Systemd could always have used a bit of competition, I think most of us can agree. Most of the forks of systemd will fail, but most of all projects fail after some time. I don't think this situation will harm systemd ultimately and it shouldn't.
I'd like to try an alternative to SystemD but I don't know quite enough to filter the list of OS options for a gaming PC. I have Mint on desktop (modern GPU) with and OpenSUSE 14 on a server.
MX Linux. But it's as pointless as only driving cars without onboard computer not to get tracked.
I find that move extremely funny, since it's purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don't you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don't even fill out.
There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn't care.
I'd say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID's front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.
If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.
I agree with all that you've said. But why add it now? Why haven't they added it a long time ago? Or if now they remembered, why not other extra optional fields that some people might want, like gender, sex, any other field? Oh, it would be too political? I see...
I'm thinking the same. I understand the people saying it's no big deal, it's just an optional field. But the existing optional fields (GECOS) have been there since the beginning of time. The original Unix user database (/etc/passwd) was created in a different time. Things have changed in the last 50 years and we now know that a simple field in an OS level database is not really an appropriate place to store PII. I don't know what the solution is, as these laws are coming and there will be some people that need to comply, but I don't think the current change to systemd is the right approach.
On the plus side - this controversy has prompted me to look into other options for my home servers and I'm loving the minimalism and simplicity of Alpine. (This isn't a knee jerk reaction - I've been frustrated by the bloated feel of mainstream distributions for a while - more the straw that may break the camel's back)
Oh, definitely I'm not saying people should just jump the gun and replace their distro for one without systemd immediately. I certainly won't, at least not without thinking about it for a while. But I also think that denying the controversy exists is not good. This is definitely controversial, for some people even a deal breaker and there are valid, real reasons why. For the rest, it's good to look at what options there are, see that there really isn't an appropriate alternative for systemd in some cases and realizing that a successful fork would be a good thing. Also, a long time criticism of the community has been that systemd does too much and it being against basic Unix philosophy. I always thought of it not being a big deal, given its modularity. But I now realize that it centralizes control and design decisions to a single org and that is certainly a weak point IMO. So a fork makes a lot of sense, but it is at this point a mammoth of the project, so it will be really hard to maintain.
My line in the sand is when a distro/app starts enforcing entry of birth date data. Having a database field to store it, or even an optional prompt for it isn't the point where I bin it.
Good distros will push default a dob of 1970-1-1, mark my fucking words.
That's still forcing a DOB, which is the line I won't cross.
This is the most sane take I’ve read in this entire debacle. Between arguing the semantics of attestation vs verification and whether we need five hundred forks and PRs, I’m glad to read this.
The biggest mistake the original PR did was not make it more clear it’s not directly because of the laws themselves, it’s to support higher level systems that may want to or need to comply. Systemd is no more complying with any present or future laws than a keyboard manufacturer is violating the law if the user uses it to type racially motivated hate speech.
I would but I've always been opposed to systemd anyway.
But for me it's a slippery slope I don't think we should even get on.
I'm curious about GNU Shepard but still haven't gotten around to swapping. Does anyone have experiences to share?
But for me it's a slippery slope I don't think we should even get on.
I agree. But the start of the slope isn't my exit point. My exit point is just before the slope gets too steep to get off.
That is a valid point. Of course it still would be rather anonymised, but it could always be a 'frog in the pot' type situation, where most drastic changes are introduced very slowly. My main concern at the end of the day is how much info will be required to be given to services and how much data will be actually stored. If it's anonymised, then I don't see much of a threat. If a service requires me to fully identify for an age check, that's an entirely different thing, especially considering the last of Discord's data leaks.
None of the id fields in the systemd db are required to be filled. This is useless. Simply don't put any personal info in, and bam, you're already liberated, from laws that aren't even in effect yet!
This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I've been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn't really care. Now that I've read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don't have a good feeling for the future of systemd.
Finally someone who's read into the issue
Will you still say that when they implement ID checking functionality?
Obviously not, that would be something very very different than what they've done.
What systemd has done is the following: They went "we speak for the distros utilizing our program now"
What they've done, is in the user info field (which already has a ton of information that almost nobody ever fills out) they added a date of birth field. They do not control what it's used for, who's going to use it, or if the user will ever bother filling it out. Perhaps nobody will ever implement a use for it, it's really nothing.
No, what they have done is kowtowing.
What? It's like saying systemd is handing the government your info because they have a field for your real name and address.
YOU control what info goes there, if any. It mandates NOTHING.
You may as well be mad at vim because your text editor is capable of storing your birthdate if you go in and type it and save it to /public/myInfo.txt
Context matters. Systemd did this as a reaction to frankly insane laws. They didn't have to do anything like this, yet they did and comparing this to changing and creating files manually in vim misses the point entirely. Intentionally doing something is very different from a feature being natively present.
YOU control what info goes there, if any. It mandates NOTHING.
Until closed source or even open source programs demand an ID verified age from the OS. When that happens you are forced to unmask yourself and the systemd shit is the first step to making such an API possible. It normalizes genuinely insane demands that add nothing for the users except compliance.
Will you still say that when aliens from the 19th Dimension verify your age rectally?
I don't know what this derailment is ultimately trying to say honestly.
It's saying that you can invent an infinite number of hypothetical futures but they are not useful for making decisions in the here and now
The prospect of being prompted to submit an ID is not useful for making decisions in the here and now? As far as I understand it, this is the concrete danger. California lawmakers and lawmakers from elsewhere have indicated that this is only the beginning.
But this is just speculation. The fact is, systemd introduced a new optional field in the local database. They don't publish an OS so they have no obligation to do anything more, actual implementation would have to happen in other projects.
What this is, is a spite-fork by some random AI researcher and anybody installing that on their system has way larger problems here and now than hypothetical ID verification in the maybe future.
They don’t publish an OS so they have no obligation to do anything more, actual implementation would have to happen in other projects
Why are the people who decide on changes to systemd implementing stuff that the vast majority of Linux users vehemently reject? +Things that they have no legal obligation of adding I might add.
What this is, is a spite-fork
No one deeply cares about the spite fork. It's weird that commentators have suddenly become very acclimatised to the systemd changes. A few days ago people were asking themselves why a rando got through with an intensely disliked pull request and now we are here.
Good luck maintaining it
Honestly it's such a minor change, I'm pretty sure they could just grab all the upstream commits in the future and not do anything and it'll be fine.
You probably want to mod it so that whenever (in future) it's called on to send an age to an external service then it just supplies a new randomised dob or age. Another good feature would be to make sure that the OS exposes any such checks to the user.