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noosphr: Systemd has gone from a technical cancer for Linux systems to a political one.If only every distribution didn't break backwards compatibility to play with the cool kids.Time to get back to programs that do one thing and do it well.
3eb7988a1663: Poster failed to add that camelCase was obviously a bad call.
badgersnake: It would be a surprise to everyone if systemdb did the right thing.
isatty: Yep: they won’t.
wasting_time: If anything, the POSIX passwd specification should be updated to include age instead of introducing yet another dependency on systemd for something that affects the entire ecosystem.
rebolek: No, do not poison passwd, let systemd choke on this.
tomth: Age verification through the OS could make parental control much easier. Just set the age of your child on a given system with your own account, and apps and websites can signal what the minimum age is, and then the OS can decide to block it or not. Could be very privacy friendly compared to the current online methods, like what Discord did.Of course, I'm not in favour of actual verification of the age attribute. And I've heard the slippery slope arguments. But if I were a parent this would be great.Problem with setting up parental controls currently is that it takes some effort and knowledge of these tools, not every parent has that. I mean, even people who do, are usually chaotic in the digital domain, like for example, (re-)using very bad passwords. So why expect people to do better with parental controls?
badgersnake: You probably shouldn’t have kids if you’re not prepared to look after them.
cluckindan: Well said. systemd is against the UNIX philosophy and shouldn’t be the default.
crooked-v: The "we have decided not to" in the initial post is weird. Was this somebody trying to, what, gaslight the maintainers into changing their mind?
pixelmelt: It sounds weird because Claude wrote it
9dev: Have fun debugging your brittle init scripts. All my systemd servers are working flawlessly, have done so for years, and will continue to do so.The Linux ecosystem would be such a vastly more enjoyable place if you people would take all that energy you put into that petty fight over systemd into something productive.
tomth: I would agree when it comes to the most basic real-world skills, but even then you cannot prohibit it. When it comes to digital skills, no, you cannot expect everyone to understand it. Even when it comes to GUI tools. It's just not realistic.
exe34: ban the selling or providing of general purpose computing to children. we can already do it with alcohol and cigarettes.any parents caught providing such things to their children go on a register and have mandatory courses on parenting.
tomth: This could be an option with children under the age of 12. Maybe only let them use a computer or gaming console in the living room, or something like that.
jmclnx: If you have to have age, then I agree /etc/passwd is the best place.But that means a user's birth date will be public viewable, for some people that would be an issue. In my opinion. bdate should not be stored anywhere in Linux or any UNIX type system. Linux and the BSD should ignore these laws completely and we move on from this.I still do no understand why the Linux Foundation is not chiming in. By keeping quiet all the LF is doing is reinforcing the perception that LF is fully owned by "Big Tech".
noosphr: I'm on OpenBSD.Seeing Linux drama at this point is just entertainment.The inferior technology stack pushed by big tech and defended by people who know better has been something else.You'll take my software freedom from my cold dead hands.
1718627440: I already considered trying a BSD, but the GNU parts are the things I have no problem with and confound myself. So BSD might not be the answer, when it's the non-GNU parts of my GNU/Linux install that annoy me.
sprash: The original rc-style sysvinit scripts of arch were neither brittle nor buggy. Everything could be configured with "rc.conf" and writing own services was dead simple. All of this was possible with many orders of magnitudes of less complexity.
noosphr: What age should I put for my daemon accounts?
slg: Just yesterday I finally got tired of all the browser security warnings and decided to buy a domain name and set up SSL in my local network. I spent like 10 minutes flummoxed by why my reverse proxy couldn't get a new cert from Let's Encrypt until I looked in the logs to see that Let's Encrypt refused because the account my reverse proxy had been using since I set it up had the email address as "admin@hostname" because this was all for my own personal use and my local reverse proxy doesn't need an email address.This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.
1718627440: I think the init-replacement part of systemd is only a small part of the complaints.
9dev: Yes. I know. And Poettering was mean in an online comment.
1718627440: Also a user account is not necessarily a person. Most of those on my machine, certainly aren't.
k_roy: Trying to act superior with your oft-broken OS.“Inferior technology stack”. Didn’t I just read a few days ago about pf queues just now breaking 4Gbps? Look me up, I’ve written a lot about high speed networking.How are those containers working out for you? Have you heard about these things called VMs? Which I moved on from like 8 years ago?Not to mention ole Theo likes to alienate you folks at every possible opportunity, even when it doesn’t matter to the core philosophy of openbsd.I mean, you do you, but at least demonstrate an ounce of intellectual integrity about it.
noosphr: The GNU parts of GNU/Linux were written the way they were so the FSF wouldn't get sued by AT&T. Come to the dark side and see what software can be when written for programmers instead of lawyers.
furyofantares: Legislating it in the OS takes power away from parental controls.What you actually described, however, is websites and apps reporting information about their content to the OS. That would indeed give more power to parental controls. But what's being legislated is reporting age range to platforms.
tomth: Doesn't make much of a difference, the former is just slightly more privacy friendly than the latter. Which is preferable of course, but no big difference compared to reporting an age bracket to platforms.I also don't see how it takes anything away, you could still set stricter policies with those tools, or more mild ones if you set the age to 18.
flykespice: > The inferior technology stackHow so "inferior"? It's a proven techonology widely adopted by major linux distros that has been practical for everyone wanting to manage their system.Give me your alternative of "superior" technology.
asveikau: I like *BSD, I have like 4 machines in my home running Free or Open, but no, this is not why GNU has the personality it does.I feel a lot of it is the way it is because in the pre-linux era, it was common to run GNU tools on commercial Unix, and so it absorbed may options, flags, syntaxes etc. from those various systems that it needed to be drop in replacements for. In the old school Unix wars of SysV vs BSD, it wound up with more of a SysV personality.
tzs: I don't know about the similar bills, but the California one only applies to the accounts of children.
1718627440: Any suggestions for which BSD I should try?I currently like Debian, because of the stability and them removing unwanted features and integrating software with the OS. I mostly run a 10years+ laptop.
skydhash: Not GP, but I'm running OpenBSD on a laptop, not in a datacenter. I have a small Alpine VM that I often forget about. I also have Debian 12 on a Mac Mini and while it's systemd, it could be OpenRC for all that I care about it.I can see a case for systemd on a server, but have never seen the point on user-facing distro.
k_roy: I’m not even arguing against systemd or not.I’m just stating that Linux being technologically inferior because of something-something corporate overlords is… silly
