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The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
(www.sambent.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The systemd change 'just' adds a birthday field to the user data, where you could store (or don't) the users birthday, that then could be used by other applications to request an age bracket.
The Arch-change doesn't effect real arch Linux. It modifies the archinstall script (so, irrelevant, if you install according to Wiki) to ask the user for their birthday during installation and stores it for systemd.
Oh cool. So I don't have to deal with anything after updating. Sweet!
Collaborator!
I will revolt, once this tries to attack my privacy.
I'm fine, as long it complies technical requirements that applications will implement sooner or later, while preserving my privacy by simply defaulting to 1900-01-01 or something.