this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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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!
Yupp 100% optional.
for now
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?
when that happens, I'll build my own ISO with that part stripped out, or just move away from systemd
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.
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.
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.
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.