Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the Linux community this year, you’ve probably heard about the fuss that this pull request has made three weeks ago.

The change is a simple one; adding a birthDate field to the JSON provided by the userdb service within systemd. It’s small and relatively low risk, so why all the noise?

Simple. It’s to do with the proposed change of law in California:

Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws
in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

Notice how the change itself isn’t providing any kind of validation for the Date of Birth, and is in fact just a field like any other. Hell, Debian still asks for a Room Number if you’re doing things the old fashioned way.

It’s simply the devs getting a head-start on allowing corporate Linux distributions to implement their own age-verification systems if they want. However I don’t see the open-source community going much further, nor to I anticipate Linux ever trying to figure out if I entered the right date. If you really want to run Linux in California, there will be plenty of proprietary closed-source solutions available to help you stay legal.

So we’re not worried. We don’t need any of the knee-jerk forks of systemd that this change has spurred (and will almost certainly be abandoned repos in a year), and we’re not likely to see every implementation of Linux adopt an approach that quite frankly isn’t even available on Windows or Apple yet.

	Posted March 22, 2026
	Written by John Payne