I appreciate the work ahead of time, and the law is the law. @svartkanin raised this PR internally within staff channels, and the feedback is that we’ll wait until there’s an overall stance from Arch Linux on this before merging this, and preferably involve legal representatives on this matter on what the best way forward is for us.

But from a personal reflection it’s clear that there’s a disconnect between law makers intent and how things like this will be implemented in reality, and once a law is in place - we might have to implement inconvenient things…

So I’ll leave this open for now, but I’ll also lock the conversation because experience from the mailing lists on this topic has told us this thread will get out of hand quickly.

@dylanmtaylor: this stance does not mean that we won’t merge this. And despite locking this thread, I think you, me and other contributors and maintainers can still comment (which is fine, and good).

Sounds reasonable to me

You also see Common Lisp on occasion, like in the browser Nyxt or the editor Lem.

Discover itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Flathub (the Flatpak repository you are presumably using) requires a human review for new applications but not updates (and the human review doesn’t include a full audit of the app). I’m not aware of malware being distributed via Flathub in the past, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

In the xdg-desktop-portal PR there is a very interesting discussion about how OS level parental controls probably should work:

The other way to approach this would be to turn it on its head, and instead of having a portal which tells apps what age the user is, instead have a portal which apps can query to tell them whether content which has a certain rating should be shown to the user.

gnome-software, AppStream and malcontent use the OARS ratings system for tagging content with what might be age-restricted about it. This has a mapping to a CSM age (which is international), and that has mappings to most countries’ national ratings systems, and is designed for web content as well as games and films.

Presumably an app would send a list of specific OARS tags (which exist for precisely this purpose) to the OS via xdg-desktop-portal, and the OS would respond by classifying each tag as acceptable or unacceptable. The app then is only responsible for not displaying the unacceptable content, and tweaks to the filters based on jurisdiction and new laws/amendments happens in a clearly defined place which is the portal implementation (which could be in an optional package, e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-content-controls).

Of course that system wouldn’t comply with any of these new laws because they’re just bad. Even ignoring all technical considerations, most of them have a ridiculously broad scope (or large uncertainties). They’re very poor legislative work.

Using Guix SD instead.

Real answer, NixOS is very tied to Systemd (the init part anyways). Removing it would amount to rewriting half of <nixpkgs/nixos>, and writing a bunch of extra service definitions for packages that are only supported on systemd. Also you’ll have to reimplement UserDB (which is what this PR is for) to get GNOME (maybe also KDE?) to work.

Basically this means you as a user dont have to do anything but switch away from projects that depend on SystemD’s UserDB (like Gnome), not SystemD as a whole

You can also just… not put your PII into UserDB. It can store clear names, mail addresses, postal addresses and now birthdates… but it can also just serve as an interface to /etc/passwd. Which conveniently also works with LDAP accounts (unlike your hand written /etc/passwd parser) if you’re an organisation that uses LDAP.

This is the entirety of what UserDB knows about me:

userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)
{
        "userName" : "sky",
        "uid" : 1000,
        "gid" : 100,
        "homeDirectory" : "/users/sky/home"
        "shell" : "/run/current-system/sw/bin/fish"
}

I don’t expect that to change with this PR.

The other user data is already stored in the userdb versions that nearly everyone who uses a systemd distro already has. You can check what data is being stored with userdbctl. On my system that looks like this:

userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)
{
        "userName" : "sky",
        "uid" : 1000,
        "gid" : 100,
        "homeDirectory" : "/users/sky/home"
        "shell" : "/run/current-system/sw/bin/fish"
}

Honestly this PR is a bit of a nothingburger. I’m not aware of any distro really using userdb to store data beyond what you’d store in /etc/passwd (maybe Ubuntu does?). The main value of userdb seems to be as a frontend so other programs don’t need dedicated code to handle /etc/passwd, LDAP, etc. Notably GNOME recently eliminated their dedicated code in favor of just using userdb.

And Userdb doesn’t really handle data validation at all. It enforces that you input a valid date after 1900, but that’s kinda it. I guess you need root/sudo privileges to change the birthdate but that’s not much of a hurdle for most Linux users.

Really this entire PR boils down to:

ALTER TABLE users ADD birthdate date;

I’m not so sure about that. Vim has syntax highlighting, programming language support (assisted via ctags), two terminal emulators, a window manager, two (arguably three) programming languages, transparent remote file editing…

So anyway, I use an editor that doesn’t waste my time: Ed, man! !man ed.

Of course, legislators are getting more and more technically knowledgeable so trying to rebel against OS age verification by simply cosmetically making a computer different from your typical desktop like systems might not suffice…

I’m admittedly not especially familiar with how law is practiced in the US but in my opinion trying to skirt the letter of the law while blatantly violating its intention is usually a bad idea. The more you piss off prosecutors and judges the more effort they will put into finding something to prosecute you over, and it also makes them more likely to push for the harshest fines/convictions that are legally possible.

Of course unfortunately a lot of the time the law is just bullshit, and this particular bill appears to have at least a few issues, but still…

Nevertheless, I did not know about Cage! At least now I know how the hacks make those IoT control panels with their SBCs! Perhaps I’ll set up something cool in my living room like… A weather forecast screen? The stock market? Live GPU prices?

For completeness sake, Cage isn’t the only way to do this. Gamescope is another popular “kiosk compositor”, notably used by the Steam Deck (in the “Deck mode”). And of course the same thing is possible with X window managers as well, Openbox seems to be a popular choice for X11 kiosks.

Theoretically you could create an appliance with just a Linux kernel, Cage and Firefox (plus dependencies) and boot that with init=/bin/cage firefox. This is how most information and advertisement displays and other kiosk systems (think of stuff like the McDonalds order machines) are made.

It would be difficult to argue that this isn’t an operating system though, because typical definitions are very broad. In particular, you will always need “a program that manages a computer’s resources”, and you also need “the allocation of those resources among other programs” because websites are programs (in reality a browsers will liberally fork itself to take advantage of kernel process isolation, but even if it didn’t the in-process threads would still qualify).

Vendors of kiosk systems probably have better chances arguing that their devices aren’t general purpose than that they don’t use an operating system. However if your “kiosk” system is advertising on the basis that you can do general purpose computing within a browser then your chances of arguing that you’re somehow not selling a “general purpose computing device” aren’t going to be very good.

Her endorsement of the stupid Krauss book is the most damning thing she did objectively, but she went off the rails earlier than that with her transphobic videos. She presents “science without the gobbledygook” except when it’s trans people, then she pulls out random junk studies that make her feel justified in her disgust reaction, apparently. Of course now she openly aligns with Physics cranks like Eric Weinstein and the American right wing so there’s absolutely no doubt left about what she’s doing even if you ignore her non-Physics videos.

The Krauss book is funny in a morbid way too, it keeps talking about how Biden will do this or that but released in the middle of Trump’s unprecedented budget cuts for everything even vaguely resembling a scientific institution. Oh and most of the other guest writers for the book are former Professors who were fired for sexually harrassing their students, that must be this “Cancel Culture” thing Hossenfelder is talking about.

Edit: s/Trump administration/American right wing/ because she may have backpedaled on Trump specifically, I don’t watch her content anymore for all the obvious reasons.

I can’t speak for everyday workflow (having discovered this project less than a week ago), but rebase being unnecessary and cherry-pick not creating duplicate commits seem like the most notable advantages to me.

I am very sorry to remind everyone about the existence of Visual Basic, but it has:

• VbCrLf
• VbNewLine
• ControlChars.CrLf
• ControlChars.NewLine
• Environment.NewLine
• Chr(13) & Chr(10)

And I know what you’re asking: Yes, of course all of them have subtly different behavior, and some of them only work in VB.NET and not in classic VB or VBA.

The only thing you can rely on is that “\r\n” doesn’t work.