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.
they also open accompanied PRs on this and I’m a little frightened
https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/pull/1338
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.
None yet
Time to move to Guix !
Has the lack of software ecosystem improved much lately?
the last time I looked at this it was at like 17k, if I remember correctly.I cant speak much on if it actually got better, but I didnt have any issues with things missing.
Also 30k is more than most distros have in their package managers, gentoo has about 20k for reference
also these numbers are kind of hard to compare, guix probably has like 100s of emacs plugins in its repos that are counted as seperate packages
Yeah I’m more concerned about whether it has what I actually want. Which when I used it over a year ago it was missing tons of programs I use (both first and third party channels) and Nix was not. Although it’s nice to see that Niri and Helix are packaged now and their Rust packaging improvements. Other aspect is the flake ecosystem, where Nix has flakes for things like styling, security hardening, etc whereas Guix didn’t seem to have a flake-like implementation at all. Although at least it’s an alternative if systemd really goes to shit.
It is possible that California law will be changed. But similar ideas are popping up in other contexts and it’s unlikely that they’ll all go away. This implementation is fairly generic and useful for other things besides age verification, so we shouldn’t decide whether to merge it or not based on a single law in any jurisdiction.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4032355482
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.
I 0man on using my McLovin ID for all this verification shit.
I literally have the same plan if I ever need to.
What is the most effective way to gather all of my personal stuff within Linux and it be as plug and play with every distro as possible?
Like if I wanted to infinitely distro hop to avoid this fucking Trainwreck right here, how would I easily and effectively ensure I can?
Can I take a set of folders?
Is there a backup format of some kind?
Is there a way to do this with installed programs in a way that can be dropped in?
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.
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 am a Coloradan; I have already called all 4 cosponsors of the bill here. What can I do now? Does anyone know which orgs are fighting against this? We have a petition process to get constitutional amendments on the ballot. My dream would be to collect enough signatures to get this constitutional amendment on the next ballot but I think the deadline for submitting the text (prior to collecting sigs) is late this month:
“No form of AI or ID-based age verification shall be used as a condition for granting Colorado residents access to a website, internet service, or operating system. Age gates that rely exclusively on user-reported age may continue to be used in their current form to inform users that a website may not be appropriate for all users. Colorado recognizes that parents are the responsible party for what their children access online and that requiring ID verification for access to computing resources or digital resources is a violation of free speech and freedom of inquiry.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
It definitely will be a problem, but it will be a legal problem, not a software problem. Even if the systemd devs decided to revert this commit and never collect age data, the law would still be just a shitty as it is now.
If this law said that everyone needed to provide a phone number instead of a birthday, would everyone here be just as angry at the Bell Labs developers who wrote the GECOS standard?
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.
DRM writers love this too.
how do you think this can be most effectively fought?
Unless first worlders get out of their comfort zone and fight back, nothing can be done.
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.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 $
🤷
In a few years, we may be smuggling in contraband Chinese RISC-V computers.
Huh, we really do live in a cyberpunk novel…
I’d done it, I’d smuggled in one of those RISC-whatever boxes. The hardware that doesn’t require a live-scan of your irises and your digital ID to interface. This baby can visit websites without even scanning your brainwaves. I don’t know what country it came from - You’re not allowed to know about foreign countries before you’re 40, the computer blocks them, it’s something about preventing “unauthorised gooning”.
Just as I sat down, I heard it - the info-chopper, they knew. I grabbed my illegal CPU just as the door was bust open, “INFORMATION PROTECTION OFFICER, CLOSE YOUR EYES AND TELL ME YOUR BIRTHDATE!” You see you’re only allowed to hear certain parts of our rights depending on your details, it’s to protect you from dangerous information. Even seeing his face might evoke corrupted thoughts, but I didn’t care anymore.
I quickly, but pointedly, looked over, and saw him, cool leather jacket, gun, one of those brain-interceptor helmet things, like a hockey helmet made of cushions and diodes. “NO” I cried, “I WANT TO PLAY SNAKE WITHOUT PROVIDING MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!”.
With that war cry, I cheesed it, spurred on by the sky-high promise of reading a ‘potentially offensive’ Wikipedia article, in private.
Only to be backdoored by the Red instead of the Orange.
Someone call Dr. Strange, he fucked up this timeline real bad.
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
We graybeards tried to warn you about systemd but you acted as fools.
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
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.
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 !
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.
Nobody is forking systemd, especially over something like this. People have no idea how much work it is to maintain software like this.
That is why we use other init systems.
with this PR merged, I am already reading guides on how to replace systemd, that shit is defective by design and this PR just proves that systemd is another corpo bullshit
