There is serious thouht being given to what workarounds are possible if systemd adopts age verification
At this stage it may only be thoughts, but people are looking for ways forward…
and they do exist.
It only takes one little shred of irritation to completely change peoples linux preferences.
Making a fuss about age verification seems stupid–kids need to be protected. And it’s pretty clear that systemd is just one of several methods.
On one hand, it’s not a huge deal as written – there’s an entirely optional birthdate field in systemd now, but as yet no tools for authenticating/verifying the accuracy of that field and I’ve not heard of any sites setting up to check the field for age verification purposes.
On the other hand, it feels like a slippery slope. If the tool is there, governments may look for ways to 1) require site to consult it and 2) implement tools for verification.
Personally, I switched to a non-systemd distro (MX Linux) from Mint over this, and will obviously have to preference apps that don’t require systemd to run (my preferred VPN is the only one I’ve run into that problem with so far). Do I expect such defections to occur on a large enough scale to either get systemd’s developers to undo the feature or Linux distro developers to switch to e.g. sysvinit? No. But I had my one little vote (one distro or another) and decided to cast it.