Mastodawn

Birthdate field under discussion also in Arch Linux

Birthdate field under discussion also in Arch Linux - Lemmy.ca

> Add a required birth date prompt (YYYY-MM-DD) to the user creation flow, stored as a systemd userdb JSON drop-in at /etc/userdb/<user>.user on the target system. > > Motivation > > Recent age verification laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. require platforms to verify user age. Collecting birth date at install time ensures Arch Linux is compliant with these regulations. The pull-request discussion thread has been locked, just like it happened for the similar thread in Systemd, owing to the amount of negative comments…

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it_depends_man 6d ago

Imo, the move would be most powerful if all linux distros were to let the date come and go and just geo block all requests from countries and zip codes that do this.

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ViatorOmnium 6d ago

Getting desktop Linux banned from somewhere like California instead of doing something that is effectively harmless is only helping Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

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wizardbeard 5d ago

I think you’ve severely underestimated just how critical Linux is to the tech industry, and just how hard it would be for companies to move off of it.

If companies were afraid they’d have to face that kind of work, they would push back on our behalf.

Or they would make their own forks, we’d end up with a painful unmaintainable mess, and then they’d push back on our behalf.

You manage upwards against people unwilling to listen or comprehend by forcing them to experience the pain of their own poor decisions that they were already warned of. You don’t accomplish anything by proactively capitulating to bad requests.

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Maât

@wizardbeard @ViatorOmnium If nobody complies the evil game collapses.