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.
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.
For arch… generally if there’s a core/extra official package, there can be alternatives in the AUR that list the system package as a “provides” alias.
From a quick AUR search, the systemd-liberated-git package is already up there. To replace systemd you’d install the AUR package which would tell you it conflicts with the official/core systemd package and ask if you wanted to replace it. If the package maintainer has everything right, it should just work.
Personally I’ll wait to see if a viably stable and well-maintained fork of systemd without age stuff shows up and switch once it sounds problem-free(ish).
I use Fedora, and honestly, I’m not even going to look for alternatives or work arounds unless and until my system actually tries to verify my age.
But that’s good to know, thank you. I imagine that if I do have to dump Fedora, I will probably go to an Arch based system purely for the AUR.
Use a distro without systemd?