https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290 his motivation is crystal clear. Its compliance before it’s even required. Not just for Californians but for me in Canada, too. This is why he’s on the angry end of activism. He’s proactively helping Linux become a state surveillance machine.

You can make whatever further strawman arguments you’d like but I’m pretty sure a Spade’s a Spade. He may not be a “criminal” but you bet that everyone who resists this crap in the coming years will be if we keep this up. Resist.

Timing’s a bit shit to add a DoB field don’t you think. I also don’t think you can compare computing in a professional setting in the 1960s to modern day surveillance states. I can also say as a parent there’s only one thing protecting your kid from the internet and its not whatever poorly standardized notion of Linux parental controls that exist today. Only actual parenting can.

As for the developer’s publicly observable commits and the following publicly available criticism of it, you can call it painting a target but I think even that’s a bit of a stretch. What’s most outrageous about the institution that is the United States of America in 2026 is how all of it was even allowed to get so far. So yeah, expect some activism.

A spade’s a spade. This is malicious compliance. The law might be the problem here but it’s on us to resist and try to make a change. Every last one of us. After all, the surveillance state workers in China and Russia are all just doing their jobs right?

Why the heck would we ever want a DoB field in systemd, optional or otherwise?

That sounds funny on paper but honestly I haven’t had either of those qualities in many desktops.

Gnome is my go to “get a solid desktop” quick choice. Whenever whatever experimental DE/WM I’m messing with can’t paint a window because it didn’t expect something, Gnome is always there.

Sorta. Whomever does payment on your behalf has to be willing to extend credit for an immediate transaction while the very slow process of exchanging money happens at a delay. This is especially so if the transactions are international. I truly wonder how the phone with just an ordinary bank account does this. Is it Google/Apple who extend credit? If so, is that better?

Fedora was the first to get my NVidia Card and proprietary wifi card working out of the box without intervening. It also updates my Dell firmware out of the box. Debian, last time I checked, does not. I haven’t tried since before Bullseye.

Similar to Debian but tangentally, I run Guix which falls under the same GNU umbrella of what “free software” is and I have to break that with non-free channels to get the same laptop running.

Debian takes work, especially if you have tricky, proprietary hardware that requires firmware support. It comes with that magical “free software only” mentality that makes it harder to adopt and hence why Ubuntu and Mint exist. It’s a great minimalist distro

I sometimes forget that I’m not the only kind of user who may run a Linux box. I’m not immune to compromise, but I’m not an “average” user like say… Peggy from accounting.

Why is this a requirement? Commercial support?

You may run Fedora in WSL2. This is what I do. My work is largely command line based. Use Wezterm. If you must, launch GUI apps from there. I’m running graphical Emacs daily just fine this way. My coworkers don’t have half the gas for our kubernetes pods that I do and that’s by in large the fact that I refuse to lose my Linux chops

Just ask them why they want to waste the money on licensing. Money is the language managers understand

You could also just use a USB drive or even a CDRW drive 🤓 Imagine a CD with dotfiles sharpied onto it like its 2001

Get a pixel. They are less expensive, especially at last year’s model. Way less vendor bloat. Easiest device to deGoogle, ironically. I’m running GrapheneOS on a pixel 7 I spent $700 a couple years ago. Get your freedom while you still can