- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…
Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/
Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.


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: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;And this is how I find out that systemd lets a process running as a user get the crypted password of the user:
"privileged" : { "hashedPassword" : [ "$6$AY98/.dwdtU20LBM$L9fFhaH.E2xA6waYBVmHl/wS4HFSPn5v/JaIlrSW6wLOfKkV6H1Boqggj/109WO/uHXF1J/NkyXsK1BaCRKwx/" ] },I mean, why the hell…