If only every major distribution didn't break backwards compatibility to play with the cool kids.
Time to get back to programs that do one thing and do it well.
From the comment closing the revert by Poettering:
>It's an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional.
The Linux ecosystem would be such a vastly more enjoyable place if you people would take all that energy you put into that petty fight over systemd into something productive.
Seeing Linux drama at this point is just entertainment.
The inferior technology stack pushed by big tech and defended by people who know better has been something else.
You'll take my software freedom from my cold dead hands.
I currently like Debian, because of the stability and them removing unwanted features and integrating software with the OS. I mostly run a 10years+ laptop.
I feel a lot of it is the way it is because in the pre-linux era, it was common to run GNU tools on commercial Unix, and so it absorbed many options, flags, syntaxes etc. from those various systems that it needed to be drop in replacements for. In the old school Unix wars of SysV vs BSD, it wound up with more of a SysV personality.
“Inferior technology stack”. Didn’t I just read a few days ago about pf queues just now breaking 4Gbps? Look me up, I’ve written a lot about high speed networking.
How are those containers working out for you? Have you heard about these things called VMs? Which I moved on from like 8 years ago?
Not to mention ole Theo likes to alienate you folks at every possible opportunity, even when it doesn’t matter to the core philosophy of openbsd.
I mean, you do you, but at least demonstrate an ounce of intellectual integrity about it.
I can see a case for systemd on a server, but have never seen the point on user-facing distro.
I’m just stating that Linux being technologically inferior because of something-something corporate overlords is… silly
How so "inferior"? It's a proven techonology widely adopted by major linux distros that has been practical for everyone wanting to manage their system.
Give me your alternative of "superior" technology.
Of course, I'm not in favour of actual verification of the age attribute. And I've heard the slippery slope arguments. But if I were a parent this would be great.
Problem with setting up parental controls currently is that it takes some effort and knowledge of these tools, not every parent has that. I mean, even people who do, are usually chaotic in the digital domain, like for example, (re-)using very bad passwords. So why expect people to do better with parental controls?
any parents caught providing such things to their children go on a register and have mandatory courses on parenting.
For example, I can have my kid do whatever he wants in his room. I know what's in there and while he may have the occasional stupid idea, it's all fundamentally safe.
But even a tablet breaks that barrier. It's entirely safe for him to listen to music and stories and I want him to be able to do that unsupervised. But solid control over content on Spotify isn't a thing. The catalog contains things that I consider not appropriate for him. And they've lately been adding vidoes to the feed and while I know he tries hard to resist, they deliberately push videos further and further up. So we're back to "I can turn on the story for you and you can listen.", which is super stupid and could be much better if I had solid controls that I can trust.
Yes, I know I can talk to him about not watching the videos. How can an 8 year old compete with the combined effort of the Spotify team paid to make him watch videos? That's just not feasible.
This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.
What you actually described, however, is websites and apps reporting information about their content to the OS. That would indeed give more power to parental controls. But what's being legislated is reporting age range to platforms.
I also don't see how it takes anything away, you could still set stricter policies with those tools, or more mild ones if you set the age to 18.
Maybe I actually like the defaults for some age range blocking and want to make an exception. So, what, parental controls that would like to support this now must implement lying to each app or website individually?
We have age rating for movies and games and the labels are very easy for parents to discern what to buy for their kids. It would be easier to set preferences on an accounts like steam to filter out games with nudity and brutality, than to let steam know that the user is a 14 year old child.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it astroturfing, but it's the same thing that's irksome about anyone claiming to speak on behalf of a group they actually have no involvement in. Feels like someone trying to score cheap points.
And the author of the PR came in a little hot, which probably didn't help.
wasting_time•2h ago
rebolek•2h ago
jmclnx•1h ago
But that means a user's birth date will be public viewable, for some people that would be an issue. In my opinion. bdate should not be stored anywhere in Linux or any UNIX type system. Linux and the BSD should ignore these laws completely and we move on from this.
I still do no understand why the Linux Foundation is not chiming in. By keeping quiet all the LF is doing is reinforcing the perception that LF is fully owned by "Big Tech".
1718627440•1h ago
tzs•1h ago