https://piefed.ca/u/Sunshine posted on Mar 20, 2026 07:29
Tl;Dr they all failed because they’re init daemons and not entire system management daemons. Article gave a nice description of the different choices but I gave up reading after runit because the reason for failure always boiled down to > It’s only an init daemon
Surprised to see that Dinit wasn’t even mentioned. It’s arguably the best alternative if maturity and feature-completeness is desired.
There’s also the addendum to “s6” which is a bit more interesting, since it seems it found a viable niche outside of hobbyist distros. Somehow I had never heard about it before.
They’d have to have changed the articles title to “5…”
I’m pissed that systemd has made a change that paves the way for age verification, and is unwilling to go back on it. The change they added may not do much on its own, but I worry about future consequences.
Since it’s rare for large organizations and projects to go back on things like this, I’m considering moving my systems over to non-systemd distros. At the very least, I hope a fork without the userdb birthDate variable hits the AUR.
Not just that, but a good amount of software wouldn’t work or even install because of a direct dependency on systemd.
More than that: “its only an init daemon that does not even make use of Linux features”. They all try to work on all posix systems while systemd is Linux-only and uses everything the kernel can offer to make things safer and more reliable.
Honestly, it’s kind of a big nothing burger. As long as the distro that you use doesn’t actively enforce the age verification, it’s just a field that is there and that is really inconsequential.
That’s the way I see it as well. Some distros are going to want to or be forced to comply with the laws, so offering the option seems sensible on systemd’s part.
Nobody is forcing distros that don’t want to comply to use it.
Slippery slope of compliance, magat