- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
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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 almost like the latest changes are unpopular or something… /s
I don’t like age verification either but that feature is optional and it’s up to the OS distributor to use it or not. Picking a distribution that doesn’t use it is easier than building your own distribution with a systemd fork.
People were already mad about systemd in general. This just gave them more ammunition.
Helps pedos find your children, is almost lost in the crowd of many reasons to dislike systemd and what it’s doing.
I suppose people are afraid that this is just the step one of a series of incremental changes that will make systemd more surveillance friendly. Regarding changing distros, starting a fork and doing couple fixes is not the same thing as maintaining it and being vetted by the community. So I would too change distro to a non systemd one, although options might be quite limited.
So I would too change distro to a non systemd one, although options might be quite limited.
Just use the regular, non-California edition of your regular distribution instead of jumping through hoops for a feature that doesn’t affect almost the entire planet anyway.
That was a comment in the case this feature evolves into many apps requiring the age verification via this info. In that case I would like to part ways with any OS using systemd as a means of protest.
California, New York, Texas, Brazil, the UK, I think at least 2 more states as well…this is only the beginning. Everybody is jumping on the surveillance state/data broker hype train.
My question is when will governments attempt to pass stupid and impossible laws like requiring ISPs to verify your age before you can connect to the internet.
Yep.
We are in a lot of trouble.
Worsened by all those trying to normalise dismissiveness to the danger.
[Edit: PS… Germany recently mandated ODF (Open Document Format), to prevent the user-lock-in abuse of proprietary formats, and are pushing for more “Open Source”… so there’s at least still some sense in the world. It’s not all doom yet.]
California, New York, Texas, Brazil, the UK, I think at least 2 more states as well…this is only the beginning. Everybody is jumping on the surveillance state/data broker hype train.
If only there was a way to stop that in democracies…
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
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.
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%
Looking forward to seeing some distros that have already been using systemd, switch to such a fork.
deleted by creator
Let’s be realistic. All these forks will get us nowhere because systemd has become a platform on which major components of the Linux system depend. KDE’s new login depends on systemd, as does Gnome.
These forks are just a reaction to the latest addition. They will fizzle out.
That the Linux system depends on? No.
That your chosen distro depends on? Sure.
Sure, if you choose a distro like Artix that doesn’t use systemd, then yes. However, the major distros use systemd and will continue to do so because it is a critical component of Linux. Once the Linux kernel has finished loading into memory, systemd takes over in user space. Major distros cannot simply switch to a fork on a whim because they need to be completely sure that it is stable and will not cause any compatibility issues.
Let’s not forget that Ubuntu, SUSE and Red Hat are used in professional settings, so they won’t change to a fork.
Linux ran just fine before systemd was created. It can be removed again. It’s not a critical dependency.
That was in 2010. We’re now in 2026, more and more components depend on systemd. For example: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/gnome-to-have-stronger-dependency-on-systemd.98260/
That dependency can be removed.
By basically forking Gnome, sure.
Gnome is not Linux.
Gnome 😂 oh god, what a clown 🤡 you think gnome is critical. The worst DE that has been successfully forked more than once because it’s so poorly managed 🤣 and you’re still wrong ☠️ it works without systemd
And yet some have managed to get GNOME working without systemd, with shims.
And for your cherry picked example for your point about being in 2026, that was 2025. XD
… I forget, when did someone get current GNOME working in BSD again? I briefly read about that recently. Was it maybe in MidnightBSD?
Fair Warning: Long anti-systemd rant ahead.
Here’s a list of some fine, totally usable, and well maintained Linux distros that don’t use systemd:
- Artix Linux (offers 4 different supported init systems)
- Gentoo Linux (supports systemd/openrc, with documentation provided on how to manually support others)
- Void Linux (uses runit)
- Alpine Linux (uses openrc, most docker containers use this as their base)
- Devuan (offers 5 different supported init systems)
- Antix (offers 5 different supported init systems)
- MX Linux (offers systemd/sysv init)
Honestly, I was on Artix for 8 years and am on Gentoo/openrc now (been about 6 months). I never really got the systemd hype. I don’t even bother with it on my servers where I just run Alpine Linux. It’s just…not really needed unless the dev of a particular DE or app doesn’t know how to use basic GNU tools and/or doesn’t know they don’t need init for such and such feature.
Yeah yeah, systemd isn’t just an init system. People make that argument all the time, but honestly, that’s actually an argument against using it.
Systemd is poorly designed if the init component can’t be separated out from it’s various other utilities. If I could use systemd just as init, maybe it wouldn’t be…y’know, crap. But no, it has to handle DNS, cron, logging, login managment, etc.
Again, no problem if the systemd devs wanted to make it a suite of optional tools, but init systems are and always will be best if their codebases are as tiny as possible while still being usable and secure. Init’s only job is to fork other processes that the user specifies, that’s it.
Honestly if some software uses systemd, I’m not likely to use it unless someone’s paying me to. Heck, at work I use all sorts of shitty tools that frustrate me to no end in exchange for money.
But if I do happen to use software that requires systemd, on a system that I own, I’m likely to just go into the code, rip out the parts that utilize it, rewrite it, and recompile the binary because fuck that. Yes, I’ve done this. Most of the time, it’s not that hard. But I can count on one hand the amount of times this has been necessary, because the maintainers of these non-systemd distros are able to write basic scripts that hook into the various init systems and you just use them.
And if some major DE like GNOME or KDE relies on systemd, I’d just say, fuck’em. There’s plenty of DE’s that don’t and a multitude of WM’s that never will, and good, they shouldn’t.
Rant over.
I hear you and I respect your opinion.
And to fold all that into a single point of failure… a single point of failure on PID 1, … it’s almost like they want to create level 10 critical vulnerabilities and backdoors.
Quick! Put “optional” age attestation (/verification) in there, so we can find out where your children are! MUHAHAHAHAHAHA.
[To all who are dismissing this as a “nothing burger”] See?
What could go wrong?
Way, way, way too much.
There plenty of distros that don’t use systemd.
Slackware and Mint DE come to mind.
Because systemd isn’t required for Linux. It’s just one popular init system.
This like comes from distrowatch. Yes means the distro is using systemd:
- 1 CachyOS: Yes
- 2 Linux Mint: Yes
- 3 MX Linux: Optional
- 4 Pop!_OS: Yes
- 5 Debian: Yes
- 6 Zorin OS Yes
- 7 EndeavourOS: Yes
- 8 Manjaro: Yes
- 9 Fedora: Yes
- 10 Ubuntu: Yes
- 11 AnduinOS: Yes
- 12 openSUSE: Yes
- 13 Bazzite: Yes
- 14 Nobara: Yes
- 15 Arch Linux: Yes
- 16 elementary OS: Yes
- 17 antiX: No
- 18 NixOS: Yes
As we can see, the major popular distros use systemd.
You said it’s part of Linux. Which it isn’t. Just because some popular distros use it doesn’t mean it’s required.
Changing to another init requires major re-engineering and it’s not easy.
If they could switch to systemd in the 2010s they can switch away from it in the 2020s if they really wanted to.
Have you tried it?
It may surprise you how non-non-trivial it is.
Major re-engineering can stand down. ;)
I use Void which has runit by default. you don’t need systemd, like at all.
So your claim is both that the Linux kernel operates perfectly fine without systemd for certain distros, and also that the Linux kernel is heavily dependent on systemd and it would be difficult to re-engineer to work otherwise. Do I understand your argument correctly?
Distrowatch page clicks is a weak measure, and not even one that corroborates the point you’re trying to make with your circular definition, with examples that do not.
“major”. So funny trying to pomp it up.
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?defaultinit=Not+systemd&status=Active shows plenty active distros don’t. Some of them are “major”, as in [independent and] having been around the longest.
Not that an appeal to tradition’s any more sound reasoning than circular argument and (unsound) argumentum populum. These are not the relevant criteria. All red-herring stuff.
What critical components do think require systemd? Name them.
BTW the community can pressure Red Hat and Novel to switch, their contracts have to be renewed periodically.
Gentoo with OpenRC.
the major distros use systemd
Circular reasoning. Not well hidden enough. ;P
Major distros cannot simply switch to a fork on a whim because they need to be completely sure that it is stable and will not cause any compatibility issues.
Yes, because that circular definition would then break. LOL.
No, seriously, they can. Init-freedom is alive and well. Many distros do many init systems. It’s not as non-trivial as your scare tactic tries to make out.
I’m on OpenRC reminding you systemd is slop you really don’t need for most systems.
KDE can be used absolutely fine with any other login manager, I personally use Ly https://codeberg.org/fairyglade/ly to login Info kde on wayland.
Because KDE and GNOME can’t possibly choose to use something else…?
Not true. KDE is on Devuan.
I know it’s not. That’s the point.
Y’know it’s free software right?
Distros/developers have managed to get those running without systemd.
And there are other options too.
We do not need to just OBEY and kowtow to authority.
Your argumentum-populum uncompelling here.
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.
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.
Systemd isn’t going to add age verification
!remindme 1 year
This isn’t Reddit
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”?
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
Yeah. Ban Linux. Don’t get rid of ICE.
… Wait, what?
Not my argument at all dude, but ok
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?”
🤝 Well said. Not only normalizing the new boundaries, but in the case of software or hardware, even locking you into the new boundaries.
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?
Because that’s the point of systemd.
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.
I do think it would be better as a optional systemd add-on type of package, if such a thing exists.
Every single one of these will fail. Every single one. Because none of them need to exist. The only purpose these serve is harassing the systemd devs for nothing.
These people are pathetic.
Pathetic is implementing age verification in the first place.
The laws are just authoritarian nonsense, and the same nonsense thats been fought against for decades. It had nothing to do with protecting children then, it has nothing to do with protecting children now, and merging given that context is a failure on the part of the maintainers.
I am enough of a dick that I will shift systems I’m responsible for over to Devuan, AntiX, MX, Alpine - hell, Gentoo if it came to it.
But there is no verification. Just a standardized field in an optional component you can choose to ignore.
Systemd has not implemented age verification
Also, you should absolutely tell your local government rep that you don’t support age verification. Don’t get mad at Linux distros for following the law.
systemd is not a distribution.
Its also not under Californian, Coloradan, or Brazilian jurisdiction.
systemd has merged a PR specifically for this use, so yes, they have implemented it.
Systemd is used by a lot of organizations and companies including those who want to operate in jurisdictions with the BS verification laws.
This doesn’t impact anyone outside of those places
The field is added regardless of your country, therefore all users are impacted.
Why the fuck are you defending this shit so much?
You are all over the place pushing a complete fabrication about what has happened.
Where was your performative outrage when systemd added the full name data field in the same place? That is far more invasive information. Oh wait, they don’t require that data field to contain a value either. It’s almost like none of the technical details of the PR have anything to do with your stance on it and you’re just big mad about something unrelated to systemd.
Youre making quite a few assumptions here, as well as ignoring context.
It won’t protect children, but you can’t igore the law. You can get lawyers and fight that way. However too many eevelopers live in CA to ignore and every one of them is at risk of the law going against them. Small distros can say they don’t have anyone who maintains it in CA so the don’t allow their distro to be used in CA. Large ones cannot ignore the law just because it is stupid and won’t work.
but you can’t igore the law
I didnt realize systemd was under the jurisdiction of California and Brazil.
Also, yes you can, and bring about a legal challenge against it for the plethora of reasons why its stupid, useless, creates new threat attack vectors, exposes PII unnecessarily, and so on, and so forth.
You want a California patch? Go for it.
It does not belong in the main branch.
Age verification bills are being introduced in a lot of places
Not this kind that have passed, no.
Edit: whole couple words missing.
If we don’t fight back they will become standard everywhere.
Instead of being mad at devs be made at those who passed and are considering passing age verification laws.
SO WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU DEFENDING IT.
where do the maitainers of the linux distro of your choice live? I mean every single person because if even one lives in CA (Brasil…) you have to either ‘fire’ that person or follow the law for their sake. I agree systemd shouldn’t be the place for this, but systemd wants to take over everything and I’m sure some of their maintainers live in CA thus they feel they must.
All over the globe, much like systemd.
Also like systemd, their operation is not determined by Colorado, California, and Brazil.
And before anyone gives me the “hurt durr other states have it proposed” - other states have had all kinds of stupid laws that make it absolutely nowhere.
And no, they wouldn’t have to “fire” anyone from CA, CO, or Brazil. Because it has fuck all to do with systemd in the first place.
systemd is not an operating system. The laws do not have any application to systemd. Including it in systemd as a field, as specifically stated for these three jurisdictions is idiotic in so many ways.
Edit: Also, just to be clear - this PR did not come from maintainers. It came from one person who submitted multiple PRs for age verification across multiple projects.
It was merged by a maintainer though, which is why they deserve criticism.
‘forks are harassment’ lmfao weirdest weakest shit ever
The slurs the forkers included in their descriptions would suggest that. I don’t suppose you actually looked at them tho, performative outrage can’t motivate that kind of minimal effort.
Exactly
People are mad even though the only age is just to have a optional age field for a user
It literally means nothing
You had me in þe first two sentences. Right conclusion, wrong reason.
Forking systemd is like forking þe Linux kernel: it’s a massive monoliþic mess noone is going to be able to maintain, unless it’s a group of dedicated people wiþ corporate support.
the linux community is funny sometimes
This is so incredibly dump
This is one of the beautiful things about open source. If the original devs do something stupid, the community can fork.
Amen!
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.
Use a distro without systemd?
As long as it’s offline I don’t see a problem of implementing this. It’s a nieche use case, but why not? No program has to use the interface. It does what’s on the can: If I have a kid with a user not in wheel, it can install stuff on user level but might be “safe” from programs it is not supposed to use. Are people saying this is a slippery slope?
Yes, thin end of the wedge. Authoritarianism happens little by little, then all at once. It must be furiously resisted by those of us who care about freedom and privacy.
I don’t see any difference with a law saying that you must have a camera installed in your house to potentially check what you do (or what your child does). It’s my house, I decide whether I want a camera installed.
If someone tells me they’re going to put a camera but it’s innocuous because it’s off, or because I can decide whether to turn it on, or because I can point it in any direction I like (toward the wall), well they completely miss the point: it’s my house, if I don’t want a camera in there, then no camera goes in there. That’s my basic right as a human being, and any individual or entity or government that tries to force something like this, automatically loses its legitimacy. Its “laws” are immoral and therefore void. I don’t care being then branded as “anarchist” or as “criminal”. Welcome are all “criminals” from the past that fought and broke unjust laws in order to fight for human rights. I’m not a Russian, bowing my head and complying. Better dead. My grandchildren should not grow up in such conditions.
Likewise, my personal laptop is mine and I decide what does go and what doesn’t go in it.
@pglpm @Paulemeister And your phone?
Absolutely touché! My Android is dying and I look forward to switching to GrapheneOS.
Why they censor retarded? According to translator is just word for disabled what i miss?
Es bedeutet mentale Retardierung.
It’s a pretty bad slur in English.
Zurückgeblieben wurde mir auch vorgeschlagen aber das wird meines Wissens hauptsächlich für mentale Behinderungen verwendet.
It’s used for both in English.
So retard can mean “to slow something down” or it can mean “a mentally deficient person”
The second usage is considered offensive and for that reason it’s not normally used in speech except for scientific descriptions of something slowing down.
Im Deutschen: Es wird im Englischen für beides verwendet.
„Retard“ kann also „etwas verlangsamen“ oder „eine geistig behinderte Person“ bedeuten.
Die zweite Bedeutung gilt als beleidigend und wird daher im allgemeinen Sprachgebrauch normalerweise nicht verwendet, außer in wissenschaftlichen Beschreibungen von Verlangsamungen.
It’s seen as offensive, but I was surprised that they censor that and don’t censor “fuck”. Even the link was censored, managed to bypass the censoring by using percent-encoding.
