I’ve only absorbed bits and pieces of the story, but allegedly there’s an age verification push happening on Linux? What’s the full story here?
I’ve only absorbed bits and pieces of the story, but allegedly there’s an age verification push happening on Linux? What’s the full story here?
They added a field and everyone is losing their minds because systemd has already a bad reputation for doing too much and being too powerful and also because everyone hate age verification so they don’t want it in their free OS so it crystalize the hate. There was something about AI too if I recall. I don’t want US law to impact international FOSS and I don’t want any kind of identity or age verification inside my OS so I understand and share the rage. But this change was very much not a big or impactful thing. Please correct me if I’m wrong, I’m 70% confident on the issue.
The issue is that some idiot suddenly appeared on the systemd repo to immediately push a change that adds the posibility of logging the user’s age into systemd. The community complained and explained that nobody wanted that change, and yet this idiot pushed through, ignored the feedback, and ended up getting the pull request merged. Not only that, but the discussion thread was locked to prevent criticism, and the merge was done by Microsoft employees. After the merge, someone tried to undo the change, and the effort was blocked by a Microsoft employee.
Despite the excuses, Systemd is not an OS, and it doesn’t even need to comply with any age verification laws. The fact that someone went and implemented a deeply unpopular change into a system that shouldn’t even deal with that info and that is used by most Linux distros, just to aid a surveillance government in implementing better surveillance on the entire world’s users is what lead to the pushback.
Additionally, Lennart Poettering used Claude to review the pull request, and has been using it for developing SystemD. I’m not gonna go too deep into that, but trust me, it’s really bad.
Double additionally, Lennart Poettering also defended not properly securing this sensitive data, because that would be too bothersome for him.
Doesnt Lennart Poettering work for microsoft now?
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/lennart_poettering_quits_microsoft/
Oh he quit. Thats cool.
He quit because of optics (understandably, Linux people didn’t like a Microsoft employee making software that was in almost every distro), but he still works with Microsoft and other Microsoft employees
thats cool until you find out the reason for that is he founded a company that’s goal is to turn desktop into locked down android.
Yeah… Didnt know…
I guess I stop using systemd or what now
The AI was the slopfork written by one of the hyperventilating redditors.
You pretty right except the California law that the systemd change was in response to doesn’t do verification it just returns whatever age bracket is stored.