The latest changes implemented in the Systemd repo, related to or prompted by age-verification laws, have made many people unhappy (I suppose links about this aren't necessary). This has led to a surge in Systemd forks during the last days ("surge" because there have always been plenty of forks). Here are some forks that explicitly mention those changes as their reason for forking (rough time ordering taken from the fork page):

Hopefully the energy of this reaction won't be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.

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[–] 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Hopefully the energy of this reaction won't be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.

It's traditional:

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  • [–] 37 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (14 children)

    The reaction by definition is unproductive. I think Brodie Robertson did a good job covering this the other day.

    It's literally an addition of an optional text field in a collection of already optional and often unfilled text fields. In a small part of the systemD suite. UserD, with no checking or enforcement. Which has value in business and corporate environments. In the form of a pull request from an external, unaffiliated coder.

    Regardless of where you stand on metas push for age-gating everything so they don't have to. Which if you aren't against it, you're a fool. This is all way more reactionary and less substantive than the valid sysV vs systemD debate.

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (11 children)

    I wonder how many people freaking out over this field have even looked at what other fields are on that user record. The realName field could be used to dox you! ICE and the CIA are interested in your location! Those fields have about the same level of enforcement as the new one, i.e. you can just lie.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Good examples of things that shouldn’t be there.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (9 children)

    why not? in multi user environments the user could be in any number of office locations… tracking that information is useful

    just because it’s not useful for you doesn’t mean it’s not useful to anyone

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (8 children)

    Race, gender, sexual preference, these are all useful to someone and yet should not be data collected. Name, sure. Birth date, no. I’m fine with an Adult Boolean.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    then perhaps you should have made the PR rather than completely overreacting about someone else’s implementation of an entirely optional, unverified text field

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (6 children)

    I don’t see you getting involved.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (5 children)

    i’m fine with the change. why would i get involved when im involved with other FOSS efforts and much prefer systemd to every other option

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (3 children)

    like i have nothing to prove to you and keep this identity separate to work adjacent activities so im not listing them :)

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Wait wait wait, your telling me that systems has a user thing to log user data?

    Where does systemd start and end? As it looks to be way too invasive

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  • [+] -9 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    Womp Womp.

    What did they expect would happen?

    I can only hope this ends up with the original simply being left to rot.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Nope. No one did. It's all drama farming and ignorant apoplectic panic. I'd absolutely be interested to know more about the person behind the merge request. Apparently they have submitted similar code to several other projects for the same purpose. But it's just fashionable to hate on systemD right now. At least the sysV vs systemD guys have valid issues. Even though as a 30-year Linux user, I wouldn't go back to sysV inits. I do not miss having to use poorly documented or outright undocumented tricks, tips, and arcana to write basic process watchdogs and initialization scripts.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    It's hard enough for maintainers and devs to fight ai and governments. If you wanna go against someone go against corpos and government not people doing their hobbies.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    Yes, time and effort would be infinitely better spent yelling at the local and national governments pushing for this to be implemented at the behest of meta. Than outrage of an optional text field.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    When has Foss been sued by governments? I can think of only a few examples, when the software was used to mix crypto.

    I don't see age verification being used to shut down Debian. They would just move to another country

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    We should have them add ss# too, since it’s non-privileged. What could go wrong?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    That's not a thing in like every single country. Might as well add a "Name of the Chinese primary school you graduated from" field, at least that would have more users.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago

    Whatever you wanna call it. Let’s add that. Gender, gender between your legs, marriage status, race is also super important.

    It’s just a field… so why not?

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