Systemd isn’t implementing age verification. They added the ability to store the data because the xdg-desktop-portal team added the ability to set an age and that requires a place to store the data. No component ‘verifies’ the age, it’s a data field that you can enter whatever you’d like into. From github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 : Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is adding an age verification portal (flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#1922) that needs a data source for the user’s age. userdb already stores personal metadata (emailAddress, realName, location) so birthDate is a natural fit. Full date rather than just birth year: birth year alone has up to ~12 months of imprecision at age boundaries, which could misclassify a 17-year-old as 18 or vice versa.

Sure, but they both seem way too eager for my taste to go along with this nonsense, and if you refuse to implement this, you don’t need a place to store it either. I suppose it’s nice for the distros that do want to use it.

they both seem way too eager for my taste to go along with this nonsense Based on what? They have specifically addressed the issue and it does not read like they’re eager to have this forced on them by state laws. blog.system76.com/…/system76-on-age-verification We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.

That’s system76, not systemd. System76 is atleast trying to see what they can do (or rather can not do) and are in talks with legislators to see what this actually means for them (if it ends up meaning anything at all, apparently open sourse systems could be exempt from it). I’ve also seen discussions on nixos discourse to see what the best course of action is, and they are also not planning on just folding, but instead looking to bypass the issue. Meanwhile systemd already has the commits ready it seems, no questions asked.