What’s stopping anyone like not filling it in or putting a false one in?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Nothing, and that's legal, too. The new law only requires a method for putting in an age or birthdate, no age verification.
What I don't understand:
Why is everyone hating on systemd for adding the birthdate field, but no one is bashing xdg-desktop-portal for adding the actual age ~~verification~~ attestation system?
Is it because systemd makes for a better target?
Or because most don't know what xdg-desktop-portal actually does?
By the way, Freedesktop.org's Accountsservice is doing the exact same thing for non-systemd users.
You raise a very good point. systemd isn't the only thing we should be bringing attention to. Everything in the Linux ecosystem that's pushing for age verification/attestation should have attention brought to it.
Yeah, but also let's not lose sight of the fact that the SPI (the legal representative and donation distributor for Arch, Debian, Gentoo, LibreOffice, Systemd and a lot of other open source communities) can easily be sued out of existence if they don't follow the law.
And several large corporations have a big incentive to pursue that.
So there is room for discussion whether a maliciously compliant age field that only the local admin can edit is worse than the death of community-driven Linux development as we know it today.
Maybe this isn't the hill to die on.
I think everyone should pick their battles, but I'm also happy that there are enough people picking this one. I also don't think this is the hill to die on and don't think the anger should be solely focused on the Linux Dev community but should be more focused on the people implementing this law in the first place.
I applaud any devs pushing back against this.
But users harassing, berating or villifying devs just for following the new law can go get fucked.
You're absolutely right. And it's the same group of people pushing for this in all these places.
And it’s the same group of people pushing for this in all these places.
Dylan M. Taylor
Oh, no! Yet another field I will simply leave blank like all the others.
~~They already rolled it back.~~ No longer sure what I saw.
It hasn’t been rolled back. You can go to the systemd repo and look at the main branch for yourself.
Here’s the commit. Just click through and see if the code was subsequently removed from any of the files. You’ll find that it wasn’t.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/7a858878a03966d2a65ef9e8f79b5caff352ac53
where do you see that?
Someone posted about it here in one of these linux communities. It was a big blog post.
not seeing anything when searching for it, do you have a link? looking on the github it's still merged so it's difficult to believe
Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it wasn't systemd.
So in 5 years we’ll all be running v260.182.1?
Don't be rediculous. By then Debian will be on 258 at best...
Debian actually has 260 in testing, now.
Which fucking sucks, because systemd 260 ALSO just dropped sysvinit script support. Which... hey, we on alternate init systems kind of need those??
They better not try to use that as leverage to make Debian drop (or just bitrot) the "old" and "outdated" init scripts that work with all the normal init systems.
-- Frost