Yes, and you can do the same thing to your child's non-root account. The point of the California law is to allow admins (parents) to do that.

While I think it's amazing that not only are 95% of Linux users 56 years of age, but they even share the same birth date!

They bought a second computer so they can ask Claude for twice as much code.

This is a big weakness in FOSS communities, hell, in capitalist existence. People with resources can afford to spend their own time or hire someone else to focus on their contributions like a full time job while most honest contributers will be doing it during their free time because they need to pay bills and such.

Fishy how? As in a state-level backdooring like was the case with XZ and Jia Tan or are you weary of something else?

Or an alternate implementation of the API that fetches it to flag any programs that call it.

You're right that asking a user for a date is next to useless. However, that isn't a reason to not fight this stuff. Asking the user for the date is step one to getting people accept it. After that they'll point out that people were lying, and they'll need our government ID to verify (and link us to activity). It's all a step towards a surveillance network tracking every move you make on your computer.

1/1/1

every linux user is jesus confirmed

Come on, you know it's going to be 1/1/1970 most of the time.

Exactly. This is a massive overreach, and it is crazy that Poettering is even considering merging this.

https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/

They haven't fessed up yet that that's part of their plan. I expect to hear from them after they've passed the first half.

SystemD isnt exactly a program but more of a group of projects, the only "core" SystemD software on most distros is the init system... Which you can run completely without SystemD's UserDB system (the part being talked about in the post).

Basically this means you as a user dont have to do anything but switch away from projects that depend on SystemD's UserDB (like Gnome), not SystemD as a whole

However if you do want to move away from SystemD as a whole you can replace your init system with another one, gentoo's wiki is a good starting point for learning a bit more: wiki. Personally I love using openrc but of you have no need to touch init files... Dont switch

Most distributions use systemd but there are still distros and other unix-like operating systems that are using something else. However, they are not "user friendly" and will probably not be what most people are looking for.

Slackware uses its own init system and never used systemd but it has the reputation of being difficult to use. Gentoo also lets users choose between systemd and OpenRC. Alpine Linux uses OpenRC too. There's more than a dozen distros not using systemd, but again, probably not what most people want to use. It's also possible to replace systemd with OpenRC on some distros, but it possibly, probably, might cause some quirks.

Otherwise, there are other unix-like operating systems. Debian GNU Hurd also has its own init system but it's not using the Linux kernel, so it's a different beast. OpenBSD and FreeBSD also have their own init system, but not Linux. And AFAIK there's no such thing as modern gaming on those.

There are ways not to use systemd, but realistically speaking, it will probably not be worth it unless you're really militant about this. I started with Slackware at the end of the 90ies, I know how to compile a kernel, and tried GNU Hurd at some point, but I will not change something unless it's really implemented deeper into the general software. It's frustrating that the systemd devs are "collaborating", but we'll see what happens after a few rounds of updates.

Just use something simple with systemd. The Linux community is its own worst enemy, in inviting people to come to Linux because it's so simple and beginner friendly, then the trap snaps shut and they tell you to pick a distro and all you have to do is decide on either gnome, plasma or cinnamon, and between arch and debian and ubuntu, and between snap and Flatpack, between Vim, Emacs, nano, and micro, between Wayland and the other one, between systemd and violent self-fellagelation, and whatever you choose, make sure it's FOSS and exactly what the next person on the forum used and as pure as the driven snow or you'll be bullied, belittled, and trolled by egomaniacs, elitists, and gatekeepers until you fawn like a thrashed housewife who 'only gets hit when she fucks up', or you give up and install windows again.

Just use whatever works for you, makes your life easier, and avoid the Linux purity circlejerk. When it stops working for you, use something else. Go your own way.

If you don't know what systemd does and you aren't affected by this, use it. If there's closed source software you wanna run, run it. If you want to install a snap, do it. If you like using VS code, install it on your Linux, it works great. You will never be pure enough to satisfy the Linux community.

Alt-init distros exist but it's only a matter of time before either they're screwed or age-gating goes down to firmware or hardware level.

I feel like the only way we can do anything about this is for us to have more money than the companies pushing for these changes, which is obviously not going to be possible... I'm not sure what else can be done.

Consider PCLinuxOS: they're an RPM-based mandriva (mandrake/conectiva) derivative with really great and wide compatibility in stacks without the 'modules' shitfest RH started after no one remembered what 'alternatives' was for.

They don't use systemd, but their installation is a bit shite as it's a "live CD" installer -- they pruned out the proper templatey install that mandriva has. But so far that's the biggest issue. If they can get off networkManager we'll be even better off, though.

There's systemdless Linux distros! I used Artix Linux with no issues.

I guess not, https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?init

@grok is this bug free

Well, 2 out of 6 people have approved now and the person who requested for a review from Claude is Poettering himself.

Not sure I'm a fan of AI being used in the development of systemd, but at least for now it seems they don't want it to be built by stupid AI pull requests:

If you use an AI code generator such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Llama or a similar tool, this must be disclosed in the commit messages by adding e.g. Co-developed-by: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com and pull request description.

The quality bar for contributions to this project is high, and unlikely to be met by an unattended AI tool, without significant manual corrections. Always thoroughly review and correct any such outputs, for example ensuring it accurately follows Coding Style at the very minimum. Please do not fire-and-forget pull requests without any human intervention and review, as that will likely result in low-quality results that will not be accepted, and if done repeatedly, may result in the account being blocked. As with any other submissions, authors are responsible for doing due diligence and ensuring their submissions are compatible with the project's license as documented in LICENSES/README.md.

As a guideline, if someone notices that a contribution (code, issues, comments) was made with the help of AI, there was likely a lack of human review of the AI generated output.

I can see it being useful to invoke an AI review in addition to humans reviewing, just in case it catches something nobody else did.