A fork of systemd with age verification infrastructure removed.

Three commits have been reverted from upstream systemd main:

These commits introduce a birthDate field into systemd's userdb JSON user records, along with supporting parser infrastructure (parse_birth_date, BIRTH_DATE_UNSET, allow_pre_epoch calendar parsing).

Several US state laws and international regulations are driving OS-level age verification infrastructure into the Linux stack:

• California AB-1043 (not yet enacted)
• Colorado SB26-051
• Brazil Lei 15.211/2025

In response, a coordinated effort is pushing age verification changes across multiple projects simultaneously — systemd userdb, xdg-desktop-portal (PR #1922), and Arch Linux's installer (PR #4290).

The concern is not that the contributors are malicious — they are established, publicly known developers. The concern is the infrastructure itself:

• Once birthDate is stored in systemd userdb, the xdg-desktop-portal age verification API can expose it to any Flatpak app with the right manifest permission.
• The API design allows apps to send fine-grained age gates (e.g. [13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]) to effectively extract a user's exact date of birth — this was acknowledged as a risk in the xdg-portal PR discussion itself.
• The law is not yet enacted. This infrastructure is being built preemptively.
• Users outside California and Colorado — the vast majority of Linux users worldwide — have no legal obligation and may be subject to conflicting privacy laws (e.g. GDPR in Europe) if this data is collected.

pacman -S base-devel git meson ninja gperf python-jinja \
dbus openssl cryptsetup tpm2-tss \
  curl libidn2 p11-kit libfido2

git clone https://github.com/r4shsec/systemd-no-age-verification.git
cd systemd-no-age-verification
meson setup build/ --prefix=/usr
ninja -C build/

sudo cp -r /usr/lib/systemd /usr/lib/systemd.bak
sudo cp /usr/bin/systemctl /usr/bin/systemctl.bak

sudo ninja -C build/ install
sudo systemctl daemon-reexec

sudo cp -r /usr/lib/systemd.bak /usr/lib/systemd
sudo cp /usr/bin/systemctl.bak /usr/bin/systemctl
sudo systemctl daemon-reexec

After building, confirm no birthdate code was compiled in:

nm build/systemd | grep -i birth
nm build/userdbctl | grep -i birth
strings build/userdbctl | grep -i birth

All three should return empty.

Check a user record contains no birthDate field:

build/userdbctl user root

Or on an installed system:

userdbctl user $USER

• xdg-desktop-portal PR #1922 — Age verification portal API (draft, open)
• archinstall PR #4290 — Birth date field in Arch installer (locked, pending Arch legal review)
• systemd issue #40974 — Added birthDate field to JSON user records (watch this)
• QubesOS issue #10744 — Qubes tracking age verification compliance requirements

• Artix Linux — stated it will not comply
• Void Linux — source-based, full compile control
• Gentoo — USE flags give fine-grained control
• Arch Linux — pending official legal stance (see archinstall PR)

This fork is provided for privacy-conscious users who wish to opt out of age verification infrastructure before any legal mandate requires it. It does not condone circumventing any applicable law. Users are responsible for their own legal compliance.

This fork is not affiliated with the systemd project or any of its contributors.