userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd
github.com
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...

Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…

Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/

Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.

  • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zipEnglish
    25·
    18 hours ago

    Guilty as charged xD

    I know the debate around systemd is going on for quite some time, I understood the basic reasoning behind it but I don’t have the technical knowledge required to truly decide for myself, so I just didn’t pay too much attention to it and followed what my distro of choice does.

    The good thing about this “new development” is that it’s not just a tech debate anymore, it has such wider implications that it’ll be much easier for people to decide where to be.

    • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
      12·
      8 hours ago

      A large part of the disagreement was never a tech debate. Systemd on a purely technical level had advantages, but the arguments were always about a concentration of functionality into a single critical program. Great while things are going well. Hell when it falls apart. That fear wasn’t totally based in technical reasoning.

      • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        49 minutes ago

        There is indeed a philosophical part to it around the “do one thing and do it well”, but what you call “fear” is not an totally unfounded concern, in that it’s true that the more complex a piece of software is, the more complex maintenance also is.

        But you need serious technical knowledge to fully understand everything that systemd does compared to sysvinit, what are the advantages of this new system and how much its complexity can actually affect maintenance (or not).

        I don’t have that kind of knowledge, you could explain to me all the technical advantages systemd has but I wouldn’t be able to understand them, so I just trust distro maintainers in doing what they believe it’s best for their distro and I never considered the init system as a parameter to choose what distro I want to use, I just use what’s in the distro.

        Now it’s different, because adding a field to comply with a moronic law pushed by Meta to avoid fines has truly nothing to do with technical reasoning, you don’t need any tech knowledge to understand that, anyone can.