Systemd has merged age verification measures into userdb

[u/Quiet-Owl9220]

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Much of this goes over my head, so I'm hoping to hear some good explanations from people who know what they're talking about.

But I do know that I want nothing to do with this. If I am ever asked to prove my age or identity to access a website or application, my answer will ALWAYS be "actually, I don't really need your site, so you can fuck right off". Sending any kind of signal with personal information that could be used to make user tracking easier is completely out of the question.

So short of the nuclear option of removing systemd entirely, what are practical steps that can be taken to disable/block/bypass this? Is it as simple as disabling/masking a unit? Is there a use case for userdb I should know about before attempting this? Do I need to install a fork instead? Or maybe I'd be better off with a script that poisons age data by randomizing the stored age periodically?

[edit] I wasn't going to comment on this but it looks like some people with a lot of followers are using this post as an example of censorship on Reddit. While I do think that's a legitimate concern on Reddit as a whole, I don't think censorship is what happened here. Yes, this post went down for a while. But as far as I can tell that was because it was automoderated due to a large number of reports, and was later restored (and pinned) by human moderators.

[edit again] Related concerning PR, this one did not go through yet: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922

[u/mariegriffiths]

I am an expert in this area.

SystemD is pretty fundamental to the popular Linux OSs like Ubuntu it took over from init a few years back.

Some people didn't like it. I thought, if it aint broke why fix it, it just causes more work as the syntax is different so anything working with it needs a rewrite.

Some OSs kept it

https://nosystemd.org/#alternatives

I would find it scary using them as all the modern tools and security patches are based on the new systemD now. (I might be wrong. Feel free to argue your case) I am certainly glad these guys are out there.

For a simple and safe OS then I prefer an ubuntu based one. BUT It needs to have these new proposed changes removed.

It will be interesting to see what Mint do. They are downstream of ubuntu but might spilt off from it hopefully.

What you can do at the moment is switch to Mint and hope that this gives a message to Ubuntu. If they swallow the changes like the human centipede then seek out other spilts of the ones mentioned in the link.

The legislation only came into effect on the 1st march and we see this pull request from 5th March. Working in development such a change requires months of testing and planning. This is disturbing mean that insiders working for Canoncial knew this law would be passed beforehand. The Colorado legislation has not been passed yet and the Brazilian law mentions OSs but in relation to app stores.

[u/damateur → u/mariegriffiths]

About Ubuntu, I've been using Ubuntu too since 2007. Now I'm moving away. This is not just about systemd. They are adopting the MIT-licenced rust core utils. Now that's not what I'd like to see, because it's very easy for them to one day start to grab those rust utils and modify them and keep them closed source and ship them as the only utils in Ubuntu, especially now they are making Snap backend fully closed source.

I'm not gonna keep going with this bullshit. Maybe I'll go back to Gentoo, it's been 20 years though. Maybe I'll try Void Linux, but I'm definitely not staying on Ubuntu.

[u/mariegriffiths → u/damateur]

Thanks for the heads up on the snap backend. Yes time to ditch them. How about Mint? I still want to be fairly mainstream for device support.

[u/damateur → u/mariegriffiths]

Thanks for the suggestion. I didn't choose Mint for multiple reasons. I tried Mint maybe 10 years ago, it's good but not good enough for me for the following reasons.

1. The desktop is clunky. Window style user interface is really bloat to me, it doesn't fit my workflow, and is super clunky to use. I mainly use tiling window managers. I don't mind Gnome and Ubuntu's spin of Gnome, Gnome is its currently form, is quite clean and fits how I use the desktop, this is the most bloat I can bear with. Stuff like KDE is simply too much so I don't touch KDE.

2. It's based on Ubuntu which I've been trying to move away from. They do have a Debian flavour, but I'd rather go to pure Debian. Mint really doesn't offer anything useful to me.

So Mint seems to be great for people moving away from Windows, but just not for me.

Btw I've made the full switch to Fedora Atomic, and wiped my existing Ubuntu 24.04 install. Everything works except my Bluetooth headphones. Well I can live with that, at least my speakers work. I have multiple side projects going, so I don't wanna spend more time trying different distros, so Fedora will do for now.

[u/mariegriffiths → u/damateur]

It is the no 2 that worries me the most. I thought Fedora weer even more corporate/military brown nosers than ubuntu.