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I Spoke To The Developer Of The Systemd Birth Date PR - YouTube
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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Linux
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So they added a date of birth field. Not technically doing anything wrong but a concerning direction morally. If it wasn't for the fash / authoritarian bullshit in the world that field wouldn't be a problem.
However, the question is how should the Linux community respond. Rather than grabbing pitch forks we should do what the Linux community does best. Support the alternatives, be it a fork or a replacement stack.
I'm watching for what lands and becomes popular. It seems inevitable that Devs in countries that aren't forcing ID checks will build what we need. I hope to see either a fork of systemd free from redhat influence (always suspicious of large corps), or a true set of alternatives that can realistically replace the systemd stack.
The community will drive the change. Put down your pitch forks, pick up your keyboard yourself, or just support the good Devs instead.
I expect someone will just make a systemd patcher package that removes the field and provides clean error handling for anything that tries to use it.
You're not going to get something complying with Californian law out of Brazil (for example), so you're talking about diverging. California can have it's own version. Sadly that pushes burden onto maintainers that may not be interested in dealing with the pain.
The engineering mindset is to have it support both use models, but that is explicitly what people don't want. Hidden features which enable authorities to enforce toxic concepts.
I don't care if that optional field exists in the config. Implement age verification if you want, just don't make it mandatory. My working laptop with Ubuntu has fingerprint verification, which I can disable. I didn't even know about this functionality before. If this stays in systemd like this, then whatever