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.
Optional as far as systemd is concerned, perhaps, but it's designed to support a whole suite of software which will expect it to be used.
They're also making dubious decisions about how it will be done, such as how they'll handle the fact that date of birth is PII and something advertisers will be delighted to know. The laws they're trying to support require very limited information, but they're storing far more than that and they've actively decided not to protect it properly.
However optional it may be, they're effectively defining the standard for what will be stored and how it will be accessed by all of the software which will use it
I will simply not store any data there. There is no need to resort to building my own distribution with a systemd fork, just as I don’t use this week´s Firefox fork because the shitty features of Firefox can be disabled with 1 click.
Using barely maintained forks because of optional features is a security risk.
per shitty feature.
There are a lot of those features in firefox. Currently takes me over an hour to try to stop Firefox being a dick, if/whenever I install it. May as well just use LibreWolf, or some other browser or fork.
Same it systemd and any distro that has it as default. May as well just spare yourself a lot of bother, and just use something that has already removed the malicious "features".
All systemd is storing is the DOB in YYYY-MM-DD format.
Which is more than the law requires. What they're supposed to report is an age bracket. You don't need to store someone's precise date of birth, and you certainly don't need to make it available to other software, to report a broad age bracket