Linux power-users tend to have strong opinions about two things: distribution and systemd. The bazaar of distributions means competing implementations or different perspectives end up expressed through the curation of the packaged software. systemd ended up so contentious because it’s a decent piece of technology which suffers from persistent scope creep that became a foundational component in a lot of distributions. The drama du jour is that systemd is somehow implicated in “age verification laws.”

systemd as an init system is pretty good. Once upon a time I worked on porting launchd to FreeBSD and so I have some familiarity with the silliness of most init systems.

systemd as a katamari at the root level of most Linux systems is not “pretty good.” There have been numerous tendrils of what is understood to be “systemd” which are of lesser quality and have resulted in security issues.

Anyways, I hope you get the point. systemd as an init system: good. systemd as a operating system: bad.

The drama du jour is about the latter.

One should not obey in advance. Especially in the domain free and open source software which is literally a political project.

I stumbled into this blog post through Planet Debian by a debian maintainer which is patently absurd.

Recently, the free software Nazi bar crowd styling themselves as “concerned citizens” has tried to start a moral panic by saying that systemd is implementing age verification checks or that somehow it will require providing personally identifiable information.

The author is correct insofar that systemd did not add age verification. However most of the folks upset with the change are upset that their Linux systems are obeying in advance.

systemd did make changes in order to obey. To take part in anti-free restrictions under the guise of “age verification” From the pull request

Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

The whole motivation of the change was to obey in advance to these unjust laws.

The author then goes on to make some equally absurd claims about how this functionality is important for porents to implement controls on computers, for the children! Clearly this person must not know any actual children, or even parents for that matter. Children are excellent at finding ways to circumvent restrictions. The idea that a user-modifiable piece of data on a local machine should be trusted for “parental controls” is so detached from reality that I originally thought they were making a sarcastic joke.

I think this tongue-in-cheek systemd-censord post does better than anybody to exclaim how absolutely ludicrous this obeying in advance is:

Systemd units will be created for every desired censorship function, and will be started based on the user’s location. For example, a unit for Kazakhstan will implement the government-required backdoor, a unit for China will implement keyword scans and web access blocks (more on this later), a unit for Florida will ban all packages with “trans” in the name (201 packages in current stable distribution), a unit for Oklahoma will ensure all educational software is compliant with the Christian Holy Bible, a unit for the entire United States will prevent installation of any program capable of decoding DVD or BluRay media, and a unit for California will provide the user’s age to all applications and all web sites from which applications may be downloaded. As can be seen, multiple units may be started for a given location.

Do not obey in advance.