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):
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paramazo/systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager without age verification”
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ganitam/systemd “Systemd fork just before the Age Verification addition. Hoping more capable developers and maintainers do same…”
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GSYT-Productions/systemd-fork “The systemd System and Service Manager, without the stupid Age Verification”
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speedythesnail/unret arded-systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager, without the ret arded age-verification commits”
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ta13579/systemd “The systemd System and Service Manager WITHOUT THE FUCKING AGE CHECKS”
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r4shsec/systemd-no-age-verification “This is systemd but without the age verification made via pull request https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40978”
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Pingasmaster/fightthesystemd “Systemd without the nonsense: no age verification, no lighthouse built-in.”
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Jeffrey-Sardina/system “Liberated systemd – no surveillance. Ever.”
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HaplessIdiot/systemd-saneagecheck “The systemd System and Service Manager with age verification bypass and polling rate options for said feature”
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Queer-Coded-LGBTQ/systemd-fuck-california “The systemd System and Service Manager, but without age bs added in.”
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Codiak540/unshitted-systemd “A fork of systemd aiming to strip the Age verification. Sue me california.”
Hopefully the energy of this reaction won’t be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.
Hi! I’m actually the creator of unshitted-systemd (the one at the bottom of the list). I had my eye on systemd for a few weeks due to the whole AI code fiasco, but the second my friend DM’ed me saying “they just added age verification” I said “I’m forking it”, forked it, stripped the DoB field, and submitted a PR
Not even an hour later my PR was closed due to being “Spam”.
So I went further, stripped all the AI code, the realName field for User Accounts, and started fixing issues that haven’t been fixed by systemd themselves. I also saw a 4.5 second boot time speedup from installing mine. I have NO IDEA how, but it’s happened.
I plan on going further and taking out parts that go against user privacy and control over their system (I.E: systemd makes the /etc read only by default, I’ve removed that code in my fork)
I can’t do this on my own though, if anyone wants to help, please let me know! you can email me at codiak540@bbs.4d2.org, or contact me through github. You might be able to DM me on this platform idk I’m new to it, and my discord is @codiak540
If the original description hasn’t made it clear, I’m not afraid of California. I don’t live in California and as such believe I am not subject to their stupid laws. Keep that in mind if you’re considering helping me.
I also saw a 4.5 second boot time speedup from installing mine. I have NO IDEA how, but it’s happened.
If I saw a speedup that I didn’t understand, then I’d worry that I had accidentally broken something. It’s easy to get speedups by not doing things correctly
Or i’d start looking for backdoors in the old code.
That’s similar to how the backdoor in xz was found. A slightly slower connection caused by obfuscated payloads tipped off a developer to find out what caused the slowdown. His was half a second lag so i’d really be curious what would cause 4.5 seconds.
That’s a lot less likely to be the case; I am aware of just one example of what you describe, and that’s the example you give, whereas I’ve “sped up” my own code many times, by accidentally breaking stuff.
Rather than assume the presence of backdoors, the rational thing is simply to work out why you are seeing a difference in performance, and to determine if you fixed something by accident, or (the more likely scenario) if you broke something by accident
You’re saying to not assume the presence of backdoors out of some discipline to avoid fear.
That’s absolute nonsense. Fear isn’t real even when your imagination is so child-like you can’t discern the difference. How the fuck did you learn to “code” without the basis logic of living paradox validation hash? You can’t even learn math til you get past that and you talk about treating people with some kind if child like care handling.
Paranoia doesn’t have fear because fear isn’t real, let alone when conducted for the sack of logic feeding imagination meaningful scope of direction observation eyes to discern “bugs” regardless of it being intention all or accidental.
Intention doesn’t exist in a coders read manual over others even when patterns of any volume arise. You don’t know what people are anymore when you read code. I would say end of story but there wasn’t one to begin with. You were already distracted hashing out against way to many of the same such handled by unchecked hashes with the words you use.
Like money. Intent may be real but unless it’s you it doesn’t matter and even then, then it’s not, now is it?
Did you reply to the wrong comment? I have no idea how you managed to get all that from my comment. All I’m saying is, "when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”
You talk trash because you refuse to listen to logic. If you will to learn, ask a real question. Candidly insulting with meaningless granduer expressions that carry no true meaning is not a question. regardless how you attempt to mock the language that you don’t even understand the meaning, use, or true purpose of.
Looking forward to seeing some distros that have already been using systemd, switch to such a fork.
Lovely!
I wanted to fork too but wanted a more carefully planned one (avoid reverting the new time utility names in case they will be re-used in the future & to make syncing newer changes from upstream straightforward otherwise it will not be a one-to-one replacement)
I would love to help with your fork, allocate a worker to build a binary from the CI, create an AUR package (I already studied the systemd arch package a little bit), start using the fork and hopefully with some PRs too. Discord is blocked where I am so it would be cool to have a matrix group / space for this effort and let’s see how far we can push this. Because if this doesn’t work, I will be moving to Artix or Gentoo 100%
deleted by creator
well you’ve already won from the marketing point of view compared to the others because yours isn’t a shit (lol) name
I saw a fork coming when the AI drama started, good on you. Don’t have the time budget for it right now, but you should contact the other fork devs, maybe you could join forces.
Good luck trying to maintain the mammoth that is systemd… why not just switch to an alternative init system and focus your efforts on contributing to those, instead of trying to single-handedly maintain such a huge codebase?
You got any good tips on alternatives?
They can be a bit overemotional about systemd’s issues, but their list of init systems and distros is rather exhaustive
It’s all nerdy stuff, usually installed via CLI. I think Devuan is the most user friendly, at least it has an installer
I’ve used Void, Devuan, Chimera and Guix. They’re all cool, and I did learn interesting things as a developer, but I wouldn’t advise switching to one of those distros just for the current drama. Wait until it actually gets bad, there will hopefully be user-friendly distros to address the situation.
Ah, well. I don’t think I’ll be changing my distro from Arch unless this becomes a real issue for me. Thanks for the recommendation though.
There are even more options to do arch without systemd than are listed on distrowatch.
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind if I ever need to switch.
Btw
🫡
https://without-systemd.org/ too.
And there’s MX and AntiX too, if wanting something like Debian/Ubuntu but with init-freedom.
And several other Devuan respins.
Or even PCLinuxOS. While it uses rpm package format, it uses apt as its package manager, so you don’t even need to learn a new package manager. And of course, no systemd.
Wait until it actually gets bad, there will hopefully be user-friendly distros to address the situation.
No need to wait past tipping points where harm is done. There have always been easy options. At least in all 22.5 years I’ve been using Linux. That never stopped. Just a corporation and its eager stooges perpetrated a psyop to mislead people into thinking systemd was the one true way. It’s not. It never was. That was marketing lies.
Init-freedom ftw. :) Choice is good. Clean code is good. Maintainable and easily forkable code is good. UNIX philosophy is good (esp. “do one thing, well”). KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is good.
While systemd may be free software in name/license only, in practice, it’s abusive. Social rot. Brain rot. Not good. Avoid.
If you want something more featureful, OpenRC is decent.
I usually use runit, which is much more lightweight, which I like.
You can try out distros with different inits in VMs and see what you like. Or if you’re the distro-hopping kind, just distro-hop.
I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever leave Arch as long as it’s available.
Btw
🫡
Because that’s the point of systemd.
This is one of the beautiful things about open source. If the original devs do something stupid, the community can fork.
Amen!
Nothing more dramatic than Linux users angry-forking a repository
As somebody that uses valkey, I’m happy there’s drama.
Yup, and MariaDB, and LibreOffice, and Nextcloud…
Tbf, MySQL/Maria is just worse than Postgres overall, and wasn’t LibreOffice because OpenOffice is just discontinued?
It’s more the question of why is everyone folding to this age verification nonsense. One dumb state makes a law, now everyone is bending over backwards to comply. A state full of corruption no less, like what are the alteria motives.
Maybe parents should start, parenting their kids, rather than making the government parent them.
Pedo billionaires really want to protect your children, by knowing who the children are when they’re doing their tracking. Makes it easier for them. Trust them, don’t think about it. Maybe they care.
alteriaulterior motives🤝 Maybe “government
parentbrainwash them”.Because it is not only one dumb state but also multiple countries with such laws, either already active or as plans.
We should be not complying with any of them, but actively resisting it. This is authoritarianism, pure and simple.
Out of the loop:
The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb, in response to age verification laws in California, Colorado, and Brazil.
Lennart Poettering clarified that this is an optional field in the userdb JSON object — not a policy engine, not an API for apps. It just defines the field so it’s standardized if people want to store the date there, but it’s entirely optional. Systemd itself does nothing with the data.
What a nothing burger
It’s not nothing, freedom is often taken by inches.
How do you see this depriving anybody of freedom? It’s an optional field. There’s no logic connected to it. Even if you were to put your date of birth into that optional field how do you see this technically connects with external consumers let alone for regulatory purposes?
Complying in advance.
It is not complying in advance, it is beeing prepared for when the law becomes active and binding.
“it’s not complying in advance! it’s just exactly what complying in advance is”
In advance of what? The law is already enacted, and the time until it gets active is exactly there for preparation and development.
It would be in advance if he had done it when the law was still in the plan phase, but that is way done.
the law is not enacted. even in your prior comment you said this was being prepared for when the law is active and binding. no one told SystemD they had to do this. they voluntarily complied with a state law in colorado and two state laws in draft phase in other states
This feature isn’t depriving anyone of anything. Neither is the guillotine in my front yard. It hasn’t been used to decapitate anyone. It’s just sitting there in case it’s needed at some point in the future.
Oh, those cameras in the elementary school bathroom? Yeah, those aren’t actually hooked up. They don’t have any power, let alone a network connection to the security camera system we just ordered. Those cameras are there just in case they are needed later.
This date field is a Checkov Gun hanging on the wall in the first act.
So Lennart didn’t have a problem with systemd being prepared to comply with some local legislation , then refused the revert because “don’t bring this conversation here”. I am calling bullshit
He also didn’t have a problem working for Microsoft, like (as was reported to me) the two who merged this “feature”.
You see that’s the inches part.
No, we won’t invade freedom
Well, we won’t invade freedom, but we’re just going to put this field in so that someone can comply easily if they want to
Well, not all the distros require you to log your age
Well, you can cheat or lie
History is absolutely full of people taking the temperature of the water they’re in and going, well, it’s not boiling yet…
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, yes. And I agree this could become a slippery slope towards enabling something we, as privacy concerned citizens, despise. It could also turn into enabling Linux as a solution for governments that require this. So from my PoV the question is whether it’s better that Linux will be prohibited for noncompliance or that SystemD enables a persistence layer for DoB to be used for yet to be clarified mechanisms? So far SystemD has been exceedingly good at designing this init system but maybe this is the exception and a wrong turn. I’m still curious to learn more arguments for exactly why they chose as they did.
So from my PoV the question is whether it’s better that Linux will be prohibited for noncompliance
That’s the same slope.
It it better that systemD add a column?
Is it better than ubuntu starts enforcing it?
Is it better that they just outlaw software that doesn’t comply?
For me, that line starts back at the very beginning. There’s no room for FOSS for Authoritarianism. I’m not interested in giving them a few inches of rope so that they can hang us with it later. If governments want to use Linux, they can, they can even fork it and make their own changes. They don’t get to demand how our own software tracks us.
You’re right. All PI data should be tokenised to ensure a proper abstraction between the user and their identity. And then a tool a bit like Flatseal to allow granular access to that data.
Yeah. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s only the camel’s nose that’s in the tent. :P
In response to German purity laws, IBM has added an optional field to their citizen database. It just defines a field “Is Jewish” so it’s standardized, but entirely optional. IBM does nothing with the data.
What a nothing burger.
Yeah, why wont people trust these pedovores and those who work for them to protect our children by knowing the age of those they track the location of?
Systemd still has no age verification, so all those forks are absolutely pointless.
If and when Systemd adds age verification, I’ll move away from it.
But the recent change adds literally nothing. Just leave the field blank, like you always did with those for your home address and full name.
The age field is malicious compliance. It satisfies the letter of the law while being completely and deliberately useless for its purpose.It doesn’t work quite that way. Typically you have a sequence of very small changes, all “innocuous”, that lock you more and more into the previous ones. When you suddenly realize that the cumulative change is bad, you also find it’s very difficult to “move away from it”. This is why it’s important not to give away a single inch, from the very start.
That’s simply not true in this case.
With age verification, there’s a very clear cut-off point that you can see and act upon:
Age verification is when you’re required to verify your age.
Not just enter a number.And the way to fight against this law isn’t to “boycott” systemd.
Literally no one will notice. It’s free, so using it doesn’t support it.
And no one even knows whether you use it or not.Except that this change doesn’t lock us into age verification at all. On its own it’s harmless. There are still steps ahead before it’s actually difficult to evade. And sure, we are heading that way and it only makes sense to be prepared for the steps towards the next steps of age verification laws. It really isn’t magic to comply with these small steps, as long as they themselves don’t present a treat, be aware of the bigger picture and still do the work to prevent the actual OS-level age verification.
That’s why I think the law is bad, but it doesn’t really apply to open source software. You see the actual limit crossed, you can still fork the version from before that.
Even the law itself, as it stands, is pretty alright. It’s effectively just a parental control system, the OS needs to provide the user age to applications, but that age is just whatever you type at install, without any verification. In general, if enough applications implement it, that’s not a bad system to help protect kids without invading anyones privacy. Of course, it can be circumvented by the kid installing the OS themselves, but that possibility is a feature, not a bug.
The problem there is the slippery slope though.
The age field is one step closer to age verification in a program that already has made it more than clear that they don’t respect their consumers. Not only that but it also opens the door for other distro’s to force age verification.
This is nonsense. Do you feel like having a “user name” field brings “real ID one step closer”? Just don’t fill that field or enter some bogus data - nobody is checking this.
nobody is checking this.
I bet pedos will be very interested in that field.
Unless you’re calling them nobodies. But then that’s a bit too “I see nothing” complicity.
Mate, it’s an optional field on your local OS. If a paedo has access to this, it also means they have access to everything else, so there are plenty other opportunities for them to check whether or not they’re interested in you.
a program that already has made it more than clear that they don’t respect their consumers
Could you elaborate on this? I don’t get it.
I don’t know why we downvoted the correct answer.
It sucks and is stupid but the alternative is banning Linux. You wanna have ICE knock on your door for “harboring a foreign operating system that doesn’t comply with the Christlike values of patriotic Americans”?
I take it when someone tells you to suck their dick, you immediately drop to your knees and start sucking. No other option but to comply, right?
Look at how Trump got these stupid Americans pacified and scared to resist for even the smallest things.
“B…b…bUt wHaT iF IcE cOmeS”
LMAO
It sucks and is stupid but the alternative is banning Linux.
Good. Have it banned in the one state that probably relies on it the absolute most. Silicon Valley would start to implode and the law would be changed very quickly.
They still have BSD… Ohhhhh wait.
They will not ban it on Servers or for Corporate use, but ban it in youth Centers, in schools, in public libraries, and everywhere else where kids could have access to Computers. This will create another generation of people who only know close source Systems, most likely from Microsoft, who will have no issues with making their Systems compliant to the bindig laws.
They will not ban it on Servers or for Corporate use
That’s the thing, the law doesn’t differentiate.
as far as I read the law, but i am neither a lawyer or even american, are those Option only needed for Systems with users and a user, as defined by the same law, is
(i) “User” means a child that is the primary user of the device.
The law says nothing about Systems that don’t have such a “user”, or at least i could not find anything.
So, there could be a valid argument that the law does differentiate.
- Providing courses for kids to learn linux? Not longer possible
- Providing older, but still perfectly fine running, Computers with Linux to low incoming or otherwise in need families? You are now a criminal!
Systems have to be ready and in place when the law becomes bindig and active, it is to late to beginn with the work then.
What’s the ol’ saying…
Good people don’t follow bad laws.
Yeah. Ban Linux. Don’t get rid of ICE.
… Wait, what?
Not my argument at all dude, but ok
Systemd isn’t going to add age verification
!remindme 1 year
This isn’t Reddit
/whoosh
I think there is an intention to convey a clear message. I will be warching the distro’s. Red Hat, being an IBM company, will probably back this age verification farce. I’m not so sure about the community distro’s like Debian or Arch. Maybe even Ubuntu will stop short.
Despite being a minor technical feature, I think this will have a disproportionate response from people.
I use Linux Mint DE for steam games which I barely play anymore so this whole Systemd/age-verification mess has next to no effect on me. It’s still really interesting to see everything play out in real time.
Speaking strictly as an outsider looking in, I still can’t help but feel uncomfortable and slightly worried about what has happened already. People who seek authoritarian powers over others will always start small, even if it’s “just a joke.” Always pushing boundaries and normalizing new boundaries that are further away from freedom. It’s never ending.
Fighting back against people who’s only source of creativity or identity is labeling and categorizing other people is fucking exhausting. And they don’t even make an effort for their one creative outlet either…
It’s hard to fight back because of all the people who down play everything as insignificance, “it doesn’t affect me”, “it’s optional” or others.
It’s happening in this very comment section too and every comment section where anything attacking our rights is mentioned. Our freedoms will be slowly eroded away, then these people will be affected and they will suddenly be surprised: “how could this have happened?”
There is no age verification. There’s an optional field for a birthdate, just like there already is for your full name, email address, and address.
I’m less concerned if it’s age verification or if it’s an optional field. The issue I feel is that it’s pushing boundaries and normalizing new boundaries.
I’m viewing this with a focus on authoritarian power and manipulation. There seems to be far less resistance to change if it’s not immediate. That’s why small acts such as “making a joke,” creating optional fields or reversing laws can be so dangerous. It normalizes a new boundary that can be pushed further. At the very least, it’s enabling the behaviour to push new boundaries.
Focusing on the definition of what it’s called seems to distract from what’s happened, the response to what has happened and what that could mean in the future for large groups of people’s personal identity, safety and freedom.
Authoritarian power and manipulation should not be enabled or normalized.
Not every tiny step is an inevitable slippery slope.
Minimizing small acts enables manipulative behaviour.
Since 2020 I’ve spent a lot of my personal time learning about manipulation and learning how to identity and handle manipulators. I’ve also spent a lot of my personal time teaching others how to identity and deal with manipulators in their personal lives.
After learning so much about manipulation, it’s hard not to see how much manipulation has been normalized in our everyday lives.
Ignoring the small acts means letting a new boundary be normalized. Minimizing those small acts is attempting to ignore them. It is important not to enable and normalize the boundaries that are being pushed.
Authoritarian power and manipulators will not stop pushing boundaries. To them, enough is never enough.
🤝 Well said. Not only normalizing the new boundaries, but in the case of software or hardware, even locking you into the new boundaries.
And it appeared to me at a glance that many pre-existing systemd forks came out of dormancy and updated after that merger too, to apply the regression. Far more than just 11.
Indeed! As I wrote in the post, these are just examples that explicitly mention age-verification.
Rewrite in Rust when?
Yes. Because Rust solves all things, just like that.
Fuck rust, rewrite in assembly when?
There is this neat tool that can automatically convert C to Assembly
As someone who has used Linux for over a decade, I have no idea how I would even go about replacing Systemd on my computer; even if I wanted to.
Ageless Linux, now that’s something I can get behind: a script that I don’t understand, to accomplish something I think I might need, or just think is neat.
Unfortunately, I don’t use a Debian based distro, so I’m SOL on that front as well.
For arch… generally if there’s a core/extra official package, there can be alternatives in the AUR that list the system package as a “provides” alias.
From a quick AUR search, the systemd-liberated-git package is already up there. To replace systemd you’d install the AUR package which would tell you it conflicts with the official/core systemd package and ask if you wanted to replace it. If the package maintainer has everything right, it should just work.
Personally I’ll wait to see if a viably stable and well-maintained fork of systemd without age stuff shows up and switch once it sounds problem-free(ish).
I use Fedora, and honestly, I’m not even going to look for alternatives or work arounds unless and until my system actually tries to verify my age.
But that’s good to know, thank you. I imagine that if I do have to dump Fedora, I will probably go to an Arch based system purely for the AUR.
Use a distro without systemd?
Not to discourage anyone, but a big problem with maintaining a systemd fork is how much the “init” covers. But it’s encouraging to see see just how many people are attempting a fork, if they join forces it could doable.
Worst case scenario there is alternative init systems that don’t have the kitchen sink
@Liketearsinrain @pglpm An init system is not a kitchen. There isn’t supposed to be a sink there in the first place.
Let that sink in.
I’m mostly interested in how will they handle giving the info to apps. If it’d let me to block or fake the request depending on what I currently need (just prompt me every time an app asks, and let me choose the bracket), I’m good.
Tbh, most sites that are slowly getting targeted by age verification laws are things I’m kind of addicted to and have been trying to drop for a long time. A “scan your face or id” dialog would be a good reminder to finally cold turkey it. It’s one of the things I hate more than however much I need their platforms.
If you have root access to the system, then you can enter any date you wish. That’s not exactly a per-app or per-request prompt, but there is nothing preventing you from using whatever date you want. The only situation where this is going to matter is when an adult manages a computer for a minor and wants them to be age restricted.
I get the “boiling a frog” arguments against this. It does feel like a first step towards gating the Internet behind government ID. However, if this were to forever be the way things work, I don’t see a problem.
I’m also not sure how resistance from the Linux community on this law will do anything to prevent future authoritarian overreach. It could do more to keep us marginalized, which will make us even less capable of standing up to the next phase.
This is a stupid reason to fork systemd, this is an optional features. I can think of totally reasonable use cases/situations where such an optional feature makes a lot of sense.
Mind you, while I don’t have children, I have no intent to restrict their usage of the internet. Teaching them critical thinking and providing them a broad cultural exposure seems like a much more productive approach.
Merging something so conflictive and blocking the revert make it look suspicious, more after knowing Meta have invested billions on gettinh age verification everywhere.
Systemd has now vibed code and reviews, in the most critical process on most Linux machines. I see red flags.
I do think it would be better as a optional systemd add-on type of package, if such a thing exists.
They should make the API call for apps to query that value a per-system/boot randomly generated signature, so it’s impossible to use while also complying with the law.
Personally I do not want to comply with the law. It’s a law that violates my basic rights as a human being, and any tools that favours it or try to comply with it become tools that commit the same violations. My laptop is mine, I decide what goes in it, and nobody has any right to force any software in it, no more than they have any right to put a camera in my house to check what I do. When “laws” violate human rights, what counts is not what’s the “legal” thing to do, but what’s the moral thing to do.
Today we would be in a Russia-like state if people had not actively resisted, broken, and refused to comply with unjust laws.
