Liberated Systemd (github.com)

This does a terrible job explaining, but it seems to be in protest of age verification laws in operating systems.

The only commit is removing a user birthday field.

Perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to this fork's commits, but what is actually happening with the birth date and where does it go?

The birthdate doesn't actually get sent anywhere, right?

Why would adding a field for a birthdate be "mass surveillance" anymore than having fields for email, full name, etc.?

The other day someone commented on this site that in the age of agentic coding "maintaining a fork is really not that serious of and endeavor anymore." and that's probably the case. I'm sure continuously rebasing "revert birthday field" can be fully automated.

Then the only thing remaining is convincing a critical mass that development now happens over at `Jeffrey-Sardina/systemd` on GitHub.

Why are people worried about age bracket category (optional, defaults to "over 18") but they're not worried about remote attestation (will be mandatory to view any website)?

Here is the changes:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/71ad73569d9a5e2588...

systemd also stores the real name of the user using this computer in the same user record. Why not remove that as well, as it could uniquely identify the user of the computer? Or the uuid field...

As i get old i get more and more annoyed and this useless armchair activism.

This piece of software is useless and cannot be employed anywhere and it’s essentially a futile exercise in virtue-signalling.

The problem is not technical, it’s political.

Go and make some actual political activism, don’t shit out useless software.

This project everyone is laughing at actually accomplished what was probably it's only goal. I was alerted to proof of systemd's priorities. I mean I already knew but nothing beats a good solid action when it comes to trying to say it to anyone else.

So this looks like a spite fork intended to make a point, not likely to become a widely used fork of systemd.

However, 1) he is right, and 2) systemd's recent full-throated embrace of AI for programming make it clear that systemd really is in dire need of a fork. This project has gone full corporate insanity.

I was never one of the vocal anti-systemd folks (I think it's a huge improvement over SysV-style boot stuff), but the risk of this project was always the monoculture aspect. It's on approximately every Linux install, and it's going bad FAST.

Just move to a non-systemd distro and disable this madness.

I am kind of hoping systemd succeeds in adding age validation. That will probably enable distros like Slackware to fly under the radar. My only worry is Firefox, Chrome will be changed to expect this systemd validation.