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?
A bunch of US states (and other western countries) are flirting with, passing or have already passed laws saying operating systems must implement “age verification” for the completely disingenuous purpose of “protecting the children” or the companies that make the Linux distros will be liable for infringement and severe penalties. This, naturally, makes many of the companies involved that make Linux distros really eager to implement age verification. Many of said companies are backed and funded by large, powerful tech companies who are lobbying for exactly this legislation because it makes life extremely difficult and uncertain for Linux users, while at the same time it makes life easier for them and their extremely child-unfriendly content platforms that they want to maintain the ability to manipulate children with and blame Linux when children get manipulated by it saying that Linux should’ve told them the user was a child and it was actually Linux’s fault that the child got manipulated, not them.
Meanwhile, the users and maintainers of Linux itself, the systems that make up Linux, and even the maintainers and contributors to many Linux distros, who are real human people and not faceless corporations, think following unjustified laws is unjustified, see through this lobbying for the dishonest cop-out it is, think this is fucking garbage, and are telling the corpo scum to go fuck themselves with rusty knives. This is entirely appropriate and reasonable in this case.
Hope that helps explain what’s going on.
the users and maintainers of Linux itself, the systems that make up Linux, and even the maintainers and contributors to many Linux distros, who are real human people and not faceless corporations, think following unjustified laws is unjustified
They do? Sorry but this law is a nothing burger I don’t think I’ve seen any serious contributors to serious distros say anything about it that matches the tone of Reddit/Lemmy posts or single maintainer distros.
Hell the systemd fork being slop by someone who didn’t understand the existing systemd ratelimiting really excemplified how reddit the whole circus is.
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.
I guess I stop using systemd or what now
Doesnt Lennart Poettering work for microsoft now?
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/lennart_poettering_quits_microsoft/
Oh he quit. Thats cool.
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…
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
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.
If I was cynical - which I absolutely am - I’d say maybe it’s a total nothingburger that’s being overplayed as a distraction from something else?
well, poettering’s new company amutable is pretty suspicious in its intentions
They have changed course, thankfully:https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/41179
edit: my mistake, I saw this briefly earlier today and thought it had been merged, not just closed.
They haven’t, whatever your opinion on it…
Pottering responded no and closed it, stating it’s just an optional field others can use how they please
Read the dam things you post >_<
Can you point to the part where the revert got merged?
Looks like Microsoft funds and maintains systemd so they can exert control over all the Linux bistros and force this shit in
Do you believe Microslop funds and maintains systemd because Lennart Poettering works there, or is there more to it than that?
If it’s just that Poettering works there, you may be interested to know that he left in January this year.
Lennart Poettering left Microsoft, not systemd
And they left for PR reasons, to literally appear not evil and to “build trust”
I’ve never followed the people or the politics - I just started using systemd when it appeared in whatever disto I was using at the time and liked it. I’m trying to catch up now because I have reservations about using projects that incorporate AI (and I’m learning this may be impossible to avoid) and I most certainly won’t use anything that implements age verification. (The irony of typing this on a device that has age verification via my credit card hurts)
I accept that Microsoft had significant influence over systemd when Poettering worked there, but I don’t understand how they do now.
I also understand that Poettering likes Windows, and wants to make Linux more like Windows. That’s not the same as Microsoft controlling systemd.
Are you saying that Amutable is just a front for Microsoft?
I don’t know, I barely follow it, I just see pattern and point it out. Systemd is a systemic risk and a ripe target for sabotage/compromise of all distros
This was a good write-up of what’s going on: https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/
This is a hitpiece, imo completely the wrong tone to have this discussion in.
Some random foolishly submitted a systemd patch and it got rejected after some back and forth. I think there’s not much more to it so far.
Redditor going full reddit over a law that they haven’t read and a pull request they barely understand.
Nothing. Linux is not going to force you to identify or provide your real age. Next question.
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