This is getting blown way out of proportion.

What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field. It doesn’t block installation, it doesn’t require verification, and it doesn’t change how the OS actually works. It just exists, and you can ignore it entirely.

The leap to “this is step one toward needing a passport to install an OS” is a classic slippery slope. It jumps from a harmless, non-enforced field straight to full identity verification with no actual mechanism connecting the two.

More importantly, this ignores how Linux works at a fundamental level.

Linux is open source, which means the code is public and can be modified by anyone. If any distribution ever tried to enforce something invasive like identity checks, that code would be stripped out almost immediately and redistributed as a fork. People already fork distributions over far smaller disagreements than this, and users would migrate just as quickly.

For this scenario people are worried about to actually happen, the entire ecosystem would have to move in lockstep and the community would have to abandon one of its core principles overnight. That’s not a realistic outcome.

Being skeptical of regulation is reasonable. Treating this like the beginning of mandatory identity verification at the OS level, especially in the Linux world, just isn’t grounded in how the technology or the community actually operates.

with mass adoption of enshitification. and with the world in general. calling things a slippery slope fallacy is a long and losing gamble.

if the field was put in because of a law, then it’s for a reason, if the data isn’t important, or enforced, then it is useless and should not have been added.

Commentary like this is exactly what grinds my gears.

This isn’t analysis, it’s implication, conjecture, and conspiracy framed as insight.

The age verification laws are objectively bad. They do nothing meaningful to protect children, degrade the quality of the internet, and hand more authority to a government that already has too much.

But your line of argument is also flawed. I’ve already stated my position clearly. Repeating “it’s probably worse” adds nothing of substance.

More importantly, the fundamental architecture of Linux makes this entire premise irrelevant. It is open source and inherently resistant to centralized control. Governments can pass whatever laws they want; they cannot meaningfully enforce them at the system level in an ecosystem designed to be forked, modified, and redistributed at will.

the laws are bad, and you can push fighting for anonymity and freedom down the road because letting the camel stick its nose under the tent don’t bother anyone, and it’s too easy to just ignore…. but the laws are made for a purpose, and they will change. and uh oh, the camel has flipped the tent, you can’t fight to remove it because now systems are built around it being there. now it’s a much harder fight because we didn’t fight when it was easy.

again after seeing everything that has happened you call sounding the alarm for this as a slippery slope… i am sorry, but i question either your motives, or your foresight.