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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):

Hopefully the energy of this reaction won’t be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.

  • Bobby@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    4032·
    23 hours ago

    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.

    • Avicenna@programming.dev
      4·
      9 hours ago

      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.

    • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
      36·
      22 hours ago

      Optional as far as systemd is concerned, perhaps, but it’s designed to support a whole suite of software which will expect it to be used.

      They’re also making dubious decisions about how it will be done, such as how they’ll handle the fact that date of birth is PII and something advertisers will be delighted to know. The laws they’re trying to support require very limited information, but they’re storing far more than that and they’ve actively decided not to protect it properly.

      However optional it may be, they’re effectively defining the standard for what will be stored and how it will be accessed by all of the software which will use it

      • Bobby@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        161·
        18 hours ago

        I will simply not store any data there. There is no need to resort to building my own distribution with a systemd fork, just as I don’t use this week´s Firefox fork because the shitty features of Firefox can be disabled with 1 click.

        Using barely maintained forks because of optional features is a security risk.

      • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
        42·
        15 hours ago

        The laws they’re trying to support require very limited information, but they’re storing far more than that and they’ve actively decided not to protect it properly.

        All systemd is storing is the DOB in YYYY-MM-DD format.

        • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          9 hours ago

          Which is more than the law requires. What they’re supposed to report is an age bracket. You don’t need to store someone’s precise date of birth, and you certainly don’t need to make it available to other software, to report a broad age bracket

          • DaTingGoBrrr@lemmy.ml
            2·
            6 hours ago

            In California they require date of birth IIRC but some other state requires an age bracket. From a technical standpoint asking for an age bracket is removed. It requires maintenance and also actions from the user. How will the system know when you become an adult? Should I keep nagging you every year asking if you are now over 18? Give it a date of birth and it’s set and forget.

            That said, I don’t like where we are headed with surveillance of citizens and I think it would be a lot better to handle date of birth on the websites you use rather than your whole operating system. It’s Metas responsibility to make sure their users are not underage. It’s not our responsibility.