Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…
Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
deleted by creator
The only reason I still have a Microslop account is Minecraft. I have to assume that’s one of the reasons they bought it.
How about any open source alternative e.g. https://www.luanti.org/ or Minetest or Terasology or Voxel.js or…?
Stripped down to the bare essentials, those are similar. But surely you realize, that the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable, right?
This is less of a Photoshop for drawing vs Krita and more of a Photoshop for image editing vs GIMP situation, and even that comparison is kind of unfair to GIMP.
the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable
Are they compatible though? Like can I load content, connect to open source servers, uses mods on any client? Please don’t presume I know anything about the topic, I’m genuinely trying to understand exactly why alternatives are not good enough.
I’ll just assume you’re serious and not trying to be a troll. Those aren’t launchers or different clients for the same game, they are different games. It’s the same as how Tux Cart isn’t compatible with Mario Kart. It’s just not the same thing. You also wouldn’t assume a Teardown mod works in Minecraft, just because both are voxel-based, right?
There are open source Minecraft launchers like Prism, those are cool and useful, and frankly way better than the official one, but they use a Microsoft account too, as your ownership of the game has to be verified, and you can’t connect to servers without one.
Yes I’m serious and I’m not a troll. I don’t know what in my questions or suggestions make it sound like that but feel free to dig deeper.
Anyway, AFAIK Minecraft has an official client which connect to official servers.
It’s possible to replace clients, as listed earlier, but they might still rely on official servers with their accounts as you pointed out. There are though, AFAICT, compatible servers too, e.g. https://glowstone.net/ so one could connect an unofficial client to an unofficial server and thus have a similar experience with no reliance on anything related to Microsoft, no?
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve tried minetest, but I’ll have to take a crack at she others. If it was just a game I played by myself, I would absolutely use those alternatives. I’ve played on a string of “civilization” servers for a decade or two now. Hundreds of people forming nations and interacting with real economies, diplomacy, and wars. A few key mods create the conditions of scarcity and balance destroyability/defensibility of the buildings. All of it is perched on a stack of custom mods. I’m not sure how hard porting them to Minetest would be. Some of these relationships are longer than my IRL friendships at this point.
When I started, we were using FOSS tools like Mumble to communicate, then they used Reddit and Team Speak, then eventually most nations moved to Discord for voice and text. I HATE discord. Maybe it’s because I’m too old, but I can’t follow a conversation for shit on there. At least everything is Linux compatible.
If I could find some interested devs to make the mods compatible, I’d gladly pitch in to help run a fully FOSS mineman civ server.
While the players can span all ages (a few grandparents on there), most are Gen Z and for some reason, Gen Z seems to care less about FOSS and open software. They’ve been propagandized fully by the proprietary web 2/3.0.
Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately I’m no expert in the matter. I bet that some mods are compatible, I bet some aren’t. I bet some open source client/server pairing implementation might give more freedom but aren’t necessarily as popular. I have no idea how that impact culture or the size of projects. I imagine that the community of each project, e.g. Minetest, would know better if the limit itself is technical, e.g. mod compat, or not, e.g. network effect and thus a lot of people “sticking” to the “original” proprietary implementation not because it’s better but solely because their in-game friends are there.
This seems to be an opt-in, user-supplied field that apps can use to implement parental controls easier. If you’re gonna do birth dates at all, this is the way.
But IMO it should be more granular: there should be fields for WWW access, social media access, sex/nudity/violent content, and apps should respect those individually. Then parents can choose what is appropriate for their child at their development level.
deleted by creator
i think it’s really wholesome that a lot of 126 year old people use linux
While I think it’s amazing that not only are 95% of Linux users 56 years of age, but they even share the same birth date!
Yes, the Unix epoch is the obvious choice of birth date here
We should all agree on a common birthday, until operating systems enforce ID upload
you missed the joke I think: Thu Jan 01 1970 00:00:01 GMT+0000,
UNIX timestamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
DRM writers love this too.
how do you think this can be most effectively fought?
By implementing it all in the most brain dead, user space writable fashion
I’ll never buy a computer that can’t be run without this shit. If that means I run what I have until it breaks and then never have a PC again then that’s what I’ll do
The last computer I bought (a couple of years back) was a decade old PC, the price was €10 or so. I needed to add RAM, SSD, and used it for a couple of years as a Fedora Workstation desktop. It was plenty powerful for most of my needs. I’m not too worried about it. I think I can survive on a machine like that.
You won’t be able to afford RAM and SSD though.
What if users are redefined as context? Now the is does not have users anymore. That’s not a ‘root’ user, it’s a ‘root’ context. And that’s non root context with supercontext privileges
🤷
In a few years, we may be smuggling in contraband Chinese RISC-V computers.
Huh, we really do live in a cyberpunk novel…
I’d done it, I’d smuggled in one of those RISC-whatever boxes. The hardware that doesn’t require a live-scan of your irises and your digital ID to interface. This baby can visit websites without even scanning your brainwaves. I don’t know what country it came from - You’re not allowed to know about foreign countries before you’re 40, the computer blocks them, it’s something about preventing “unauthorised gooning”.
Just as I sat down, I heard it - the info-chopper, they knew. I grabbed my illegal CPU just as the door was bust open, “INFORMATION PROTECTION OFFICER, CLOSE YOUR EYES AND TELL ME YOUR BIRTHDATE!” You see you’re only allowed to hear certain parts of our rights depending on your details, it’s to protect you from dangerous information. Even seeing his face might evoke corrupted thoughts, but I didn’t care anymore.
I quickly, but pointedly, looked over, and saw him, cool leather jacket, gun, one of those brain-interceptor helmet things, like a hockey helmet made of cushions and diodes. “NO” I cried, “I WANT TO PLAY SNAKE WITHOUT PROVIDING MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!”.
With that war cry, I cheesed it, spurred on by the sky-high promise of reading a ‘potentially offensive’ Wikipedia article, in private.
Only to be backdoored by the Red instead of the Orange.
Someone call Dr. Strange, he fucked up this timeline real bad.
Email your legislators telling them that parents already have access to network block tools, these laws won’t stop the problem anyway (run through a vpn), they’re a free speech nightmare, they’re collecting more data on American citizens when America has data breaches losing data every few days, and Congress literally studied this twenty years ago and decided it wasn’t a good idea then, what makes it a good idea now?
uh…$? same reason the majority of US politicians vote anyway on anything put in front of them.
the only thing sacred in the USA is $
Unless first worlders get out of their comfort zone and fight back, nothing can be done.
so much for making our own tech!
Time to move to Guix !
Has the lack of software ecosystem improved much lately?
i think i gonna switch to sixOS systemd is corporate shit
Guix comes with shepherd btw
I hope the alt inits or even the hardware itself aren’t targeted next.
I didn’t need one more reason to hate systemd
The answer to the PII issues is hence not restrictions in userdb, the answer is proper app sandboxing. And that even already exists in flatpak! It restricts access to $HOME already, and to userdb too! And that’s the way to do it!
I don’t use flatpak. I don’t like it. Linux is about choice and I choose not to use that.
Hence, just embrace app sandboxing! And if you come to me and say “hey, I run all my apps without sandboxing, but i want the birthday hidden anyway” then I can only say, your model is really really broken. Fix your security model first, then come back.
In the words of the great Linus Torvalds, go fuck yourself.
This is the first time I’ve cared about the whole systemd debate, so that’s something I guess. Not interested in anything that kowtows to this age verification nonsense
Does BSD use systemd? I always wanted to try it and if this keeps up I might take the plunge.
I guess not, https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?init
There’s systemdless Linux distros! I used Artix Linux with no issues.
Artix (Arch w/out systemd) supports many inits. I’d recommend dinit (which is very easy to use) or s6 (which seems more stable on Artix, but less user friendly helper tools). Both are very fast, faster than the other inits.
- There is also Chimera Linux which uses dinit and is very clean imho. A very modern take on making a traditional Linux distro which does things well and uses clean and simple OS software stack.
- Void Linux uses runit
- Devuan (Debian w/out systemd) you can use sysV, OpenRC, or runit
- And obviously there is Gentoo, which supports using OpenRC, with unofficial community guides for some other inits.
Can someone explain how they do this verification?
The Californian law doesn’t require being temper proof (yet)
Great that California allows us to be angry about it.
Colorado too and some other states have similar plans.
The EU plans go in a different and worse direction.
Not at all for now. Its just about storing the birth date in a way that the system can use it.
echo "18+" > ~/.age_rcAm I compliant with California’s law now? Apps can use the POSIX API to access my age.
Yes, and you can do the same thing to your child’s non-root account. The point of the California law is to allow admins (parents) to do that.
Yes and that’s fine and everyone freaking out is being dumb.
There are fascist governments demanding genital inspection for playing highschool sports and they’re losing their shit over an accounts API returning an unverified age bracket!
There are fascist governments demanding genital inspection for playing highschool sports
- That is already going on in the very same country we’re discussing.
- “Things could be even worse, so until things are just as bad as that, don’t complain or try to stop it from getting worse.”
If you yell that the everything is on fire, over an API that doesn’t do verification, it’s less effective when you yell the same thing over real issues.
That’s a poor analogy, because nobody is lying, saying things are on fire that aren’t.
We weren’t born yesterday—or at least I wasn’t. We know where this is going, and it’s folly to wait until almost the end before pushing back.
Why do they need the age after all. What are authorities going to do with it?
It’s important to tell the Children apart because they are very sought after
It’s Meta pushing for this to avoid accountability and fines.
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/
They (politicians) are obsessed with control.
To my understanding, it’s also Meta that is lobbying for this. Basically pushing the responsibility elsewhere to the operating system vendors
But how would they know I have been truthful about my age? I mean I am never putting my real age when registering on websites.
I guess they want this law to fall back on in case an underage individual is presented with mature/inappropriate content. Then they can just say that you lied about your age and that is not their fault.
Yes, so pretty much they don’t want to be held responsible. And the government is bending over to comply with the tech bros.
I’m afraid so…
Control what content you see and add some extra detail to fingerprint you.
If they can get this simple age verification done from everyone, it’s not going to be hard to add “new requirements” in the future
Either this or block access to people living in hostile places. Currently it is a parental control with no verification of the thruth. You can put 01/01/01 there, if you want. If it turns into identity verification we will see what we can do.
“Protect Children” !
