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>.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…
(Thanks for actually engaging with the discussion).
Ok, sort of, maybe but this move is the move of big tech dominance. By caving to it, “linux” is positioning itself into a position of compliance with them, not opposition. What complying does is also removing the option to really oppose and evade big tech’s dominance.
We’re simply entering the era where installing an illegal operating system becomes a thing that is possible, because previously nobody cared to make an operating system illegal. And I would to have many distros to choose from that don’t comply with this, but I will pick the wacky silly outlier if I hate to. At least I like to think of myself as doing that.
I agree with your worries about the second point. Mandating thing like this by law is bad. But having a standard on its own is not. Ideally this should have come from an industry standard and not a legal one, but inaction is part of what got us into this mess.
I agree with this. Here’s where it gets weird. All these bills stem from meta lobbying. Why do they regulation in this specific thing when they’re totally capable of forming a standard committee or something with Microsoft and Google?
Because they knew some people in the OS community would take the bait.