An init system does not need to know my personal details; it’s for starting programs in a specific order just fuck off with this shit. You don’t even have to capitulate to this stuff and these freaks are out here doing it preemptively like they expect a fucking pat on the head for being first in line to dive tongue first on to that boot.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Systemd isn't an init system. Systemd-init is an init system and it is a part of the systemd suite.
Whatever the fuck it is it doesn’t need to know how old I am to do its job.
It already has fields for personal information, though, and they're every bit as sensitive as your birthdate. realName, emailAddress, location, and timezone are already in there. The important part is that they're all optional, and you don't have to fill them in at all, or can fill them in with fake data. The system still serves you, not some outside party.
But the timing of it does have a lot of people freaking out about it.
I now fear it will one day be required for services on the internet (as it is by a recent law in California). I want to make that less likely, and more difficult to implement.
Having a principle the majority do not have and refusing to participate means being another step further out of society.
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It doesn't need to know your age. It just provides a way to take a note of your birth date, only if you want to. The system already has a place to write your name and home address. All are optional and practically nobody uses them.
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It has been sold as just an init system to people who argued it's a Katamari Damacy. We now know who was right.
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Everyone should set it to 1970-01-01.
Ive been born since 1900-01-01 for a long time now.
Me too!
Although someone (steam maybe? I don't remember) updated their system and won't take it anymore. So now it's 1930-01-01.
You should try it. It's like I'm 30 years younger!
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Most people are born on the same date their whole life.
In other news there has been a massive uptick in Boomers converting to Linux....
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My date of birth is FU/CK/YOU
YOU-FU-CK is the better format and this is not debatable.
This guy fucks
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FU/CK/YOOU
This is getting blown way out of proportion.
What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field. It doesn’t block installation, it doesn’t require verification, and it doesn’t change how the OS actually works. It just exists, and you can ignore it entirely.
The leap to “this is step one toward needing a passport to install an OS” is a classic slippery slope. It jumps from a harmless, non-enforced field straight to full identity verification with no actual mechanism connecting the two.
More importantly, this ignores how Linux works at a fundamental level.
Linux is open source, which means the code is public and can be modified by anyone. If any distribution ever tried to enforce something invasive like identity checks, that code would be stripped out almost immediately and redistributed as a fork. People already fork distributions over far smaller disagreements than this, and users would migrate just as quickly.
For this scenario people are worried about to actually happen, the entire ecosystem would have to move in lockstep and the community would have to abandon one of its core principles overnight. That’s not a realistic outcome.
Being skeptical of regulation is reasonable. Treating this like the beginning of mandatory identity verification at the OS level, especially in the Linux world, just isn’t grounded in how the technology or the community actually operates.
What is the use case for that field? I do not see it as being used as anything else than a stepping stone towards age verification.
this is the correct way to frame this issue. it serves no purpose other than to support things that are further down a slope
I wonder if a fork becomes successful, or if traditional init based systems make a comeback
enterprise users obviously won't give a shit about any of this, and will keep using redhat or amazon linux or whatever
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It's giving an inch. We shouldn't be doing that. We should be fighting tooth an nail against every single aggression against our privacy. They've already taken far too much.
with mass adoption of enshitification. and with the world in general. calling things a slippery slope fallacy is a long and losing gamble.
if the field was put in because of a law, then it’s for a reason, if the data isn’t important, or enforced, then it is useless and should not have been added.
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What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field.
The timing is dogshit.
Like getting handed a grenade pin and told "It's a fucking pin! It's harmless, what are you worried about?"
is a classic slippery slope
Were have you been the last few years or so? We're not just "going down" one slippery slope after another, we're speeding down them.
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If that is the case, explain why is it being implemented in the heat of mass age verification? What is the motive?
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The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.
sudo my age to a thousand years then; no, thank you very very much
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My hate of SystemD is further justified! And you all just called me gray haired and not willing to update with the times!
Remember when they said "relax, it's just an init system, no biggie"? Pepperidge farm remembers.
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