For those interested, the Systemd release that’s planned to include the controversial ‘birthDate’ field to user records, complying with age-verification laws, is v261 (see ‘milestone’ in the pull request). This release seems to be planned for May.
The current release, from some hours ago, is v260.1. I see that Ubuntu Noble (24.04) just updated to v255.
I think everyone should pick their battles, but I’m also happy that there are enough people picking this one. I also don’t think this is the hill to die on and don’t think the anger should be solely focused on the Linux Dev community but should be more focused on the people implementing this law in the first place.
I applaud any devs pushing back against this.
But users harassing, berating or villifying devs just for following the new law can go get fucked.