this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Add a required birth date prompt (YYYY-MM-DD) to the user creation flow, stored as a systemd userdb JSON drop-in at /etc/userdb/.user on the target system.

Motivation

Recent age verification laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. require platforms to verify user age. Collecting birth date at install time ensures Arch Linux is compliant with these regulations.

This is just a pull request, no changes yet.

The pull-request discussion thread has been locked, just like it happened for the similar thread in Systemd, owing to the amount of negative comments...

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

It wouldn't be easy to ban desktop Linux without inadvertently banning Linux servers and IoT devices. So we should let them walk into this quagmire and get bogged down with an impossible task, instead of capitulating at the first opportunity.