I think it's too early to be making decisions based on this alone.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Fair point, but I think at this point it's extremely likely Fedora will comply, and my issue with this is ideological, not practical. I will not use a distribution that complies with this law because I believe it is morally compromised.
💪 🤝
I will not use a distribution that complies with this law because I believe it is morally compromised.
RH owning Fedora and funding it by making the American army more efficient at killing civilians - perfectly fine
Fedora will probably comply with the equivalent of a teen setting their age to 130 to watch porn - morally compromised
I'd be more worried about literally upstream bug testing for the DoD...
Care to backup your claim? I’m not familiar with that bit.
As far as I’m aware, fedora is a public project and not a org that is “owned” by anyone. You’ve got to do a great bit of mental gymnastics to arrive at your conclusion just to try and make me feel stupid. Why?
Also don’t act like there aren’t serious implications of imposing age checks in supposedly free libre software. Libre software should be a fundamental human right. You can believe in that and also that military interventionism is also bad.
You can conflate my point of view all you want, but let’s dial back the cutesy sarcasm. Thanks.
Red Hat is owned by IBM, which is one of the largest contractors for compute infrastructure and software for the US military. They've particularly taken an interest in 'AI' systems as automated target acquisition is now seen as a viable tactic following its use by Israel in Gaza.
Like bobo (rudely) said, Red Hat is what keeps the lights on for Fedora, even if its ownership is independent of RHEL. One cannot exist without the other.
On top of the many large multi-billion contracts to the DoD (like $151B for missile tech a few months ago), you can also search direct contracts to individual agencies at fdps.gov (i.e. direct contracts exclusive to the US Army, >$100,000 - you can see that Red Hat actually maintains some of their combat systems).
IBM and Red Hat also have played a significant role in the genocide in Gaza.
Thanks for taking the time to share that with me. I am no Zionist. However, I do pose the question, because of Red Hat's stewardship of Fedora, do you believe that makes Fedora morally compromised? Because Red Hat develops systemd, does that mean all Linux distros that use it are thusly compromised as well? ARPANET, the technology that the modern internet stems from, was developed directly by the US Deprtment of Defense. Can a leftist then morally use the internet? I don't mean this as a sarcastic strawman but as a genuine question in good faith. I myself don't have an answer, probably a bit yes and a bit no. I will point out the distinction that while Fedora doesn't have control of what Red Hat does or does not to, it does have direct control over whether or not to implement these age verification laws in question.
What about a distro like Universal Blue, which is directly downstream of Fedora but not affiliated with it organizationally? Where do we draw the line between consent and simple happenstance? Everything is connected to a Nazi, a Zionist or colonialism if you dig deep enough, we live in capitalist hell-world, it's the foundation of our very society. Consent is implied an in many cases, unavoidable.
That being said you have given me quite a bit to think about and if anything have solidified my decision to move away from Fedora. I hope you don't interpret my response as adversarial in any way like others who have responded to my post. Cheers
I'm in the same spot and I don't have any answers haha. I'm on Fedora too, although I've been meaning to switch to another distro for a while now.
I think that there's a distinction between upstream/downstream, and direct/indirect links between technologies though. The internet comes from military technology, but it's a really broad system of protocols that itself is a communications technology. I don't think that it's possible to moralize the act of connecting to and exchanging data with a server; it's more relevant what is being connected to and how those connections are being used.
I think you could also make the same argument about Linux, in the sense that many corporations contributing to the kernel (or to packages like systemd) are deeply connected to imperialism and fascism. Is it immoral to use any distro at all?
For me distinction between this line of reasoning and the discussion about Fedora / Red Hat is that Fedora is upstream of RHEL, and users participate in the process of testing and fixing issues with software that's later used by militaries and corporations. The potential issue with this is that the user is (unknowingly) taking an active role in the production of a commodity used to kill. Even if you never report bugs, share any data, or contribute anything, it feels icky to use the distro (at least for me).
As for the age verification laws, the reality is that larger distros with corporate or non-profit owernship structures will be likely to comply out of obligation, while smaller distros might feel less pressure to comply. It's the same with the issue of sanctions compliance, where Red Hat and the Linux Foundation had an obligation to restrict contributions from users in sanctioned countries. The issue is almost entirely top-down and in the hands of lobbying corporations like Meta. Legislation like this is made to make it feel like non-compliance means financial ruin, which may be the reality as OSS isn't exactly profitable. I still think that compliance with it would be wrong, but it's not like any of these distros directly participated in pushing these bills, and we still have to wait and see what comes of all this so it's speculation. Either way I'm not super happy about Fedora right now
As far as I’m aware, fedora is a public project and not a org that is “owned” by anyone.
Yeah, RH only owns the fedora trademark, provides the infrastructure, pays for the salaries, and is the biggest funder of the org by far. It's totally independent...
You’ve got to do a great bit of mental gymnastics to arrive at your conclusion just to try and make me feel stupid. Why?
If you feel stupid for not knowing basic information that's your issue.
Also don’t act like there aren’t serious implications of imposing age checks in supposedly free libre software. Libre software should be a fundamental human right. You can believe in that and also that military interventionism is also bad.
Do remind me why you made this post? You can act virtue signal all you want, the fact is that you're morally outraged about only one of those things. And since you're this butthurt, I'm guessing my comment making fun of it really hit the spot.
But it's a good time to put /home on a separate partition and make backups of files you edited in /etc so you can switch distros quickly.
I've never done those things but I still switch as quickly as I feel like
I agree.
As far as I know, most distros are waiting. I heard debian is doing that (people say their org structure makes them unable to satisfy it), lead dev of pclinuxos said it might be a "nothingburger", the distros who said "no plans" are doing that, etc.
We might get the "stack" in place before distros do anything. Only a few distros refused outright so far, even less are trying to comply.
I think we might linger in this limbo for a long-long time, and the distros might only decide when websites start requiring and API (or when they get taken down by authorities).
I'm tempering the systemd thing as I do feel it is somewhat getting blown out of proportion. Though I did try some non systemd distros in a VM over the last week.
A bigger issue for me is this push to embrace AI. It seems all the American tech companies are jumping on board and Red Hat is no exception.
I want to love Fedora but this is the last straw for me.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/31/red_hat_ai_dev/
Essentially any distro with funding primarily from US tech companies is going to go to shit. It's only a matter of time.
I do run EndeavourOS on my main PC and it's pretty great. I have not seen any statement regarding their position on the age attestation crap. I'll jump ship if they come out in favour of it. I just hope they do not.
A bigger issue for me is this push to embrace AI. It seems all the American tech companies are jumping on board and Red Hat is no exception
Wouldn't the same logic apply to systemd that's controlled by RedHat?
They merged the PR regardless of many contributors being against it, silenced discussions about it and immediately closed another PR submitted for reverting the change.
That's corporate behavior, not community.
That's the main reason that made me distrust them and jump ship, way more than the field itself.
Absolutely. I have no love for Red Hat as a company. My first Linux distro was Red Hat 6. I want to love Fedora for purely nostalgic reasons.
Systemd adding the birthdate field to the user info is definitely troubling. It shows which way the wind is blowing for sure. I should have stated that I am MORE concerned about the AI takeover in the immediate. I am by no means dismissing the systemd concerns.
I'm less twitchy on the AI thing. CEO's gonna CEO, and I think this whole AI thing is going to quietly die down. It's just... not as useful as the people pushing it says it is. You can't just mass-delusion people into thinking something does what it doesn't do. It writes bad code. It is insecure. It makes people insane. These are facts. The tech is not improving.
Not to mention, I find the Register quite often to be a bit too-cute-by-half in its "reporting". We'll see.
Sure, nothing to worry about, sure ...
"Spain Slaps Yoti With €950,000 Fine Over Biometric Data
The age verification company kept geolocation data for five years. Users could skip the privacy policy entirely."
https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/yoti-spain-aepd-fine-biometric-data-gdpr-2026/
I've been using Linux 20+ years as my main os. Most of that time I've been an arch user. I moved to void Linux 2 weeks ago. I'm very much a start from scratch and build to my liking sort of person, so I just extracted the rootfs base system to a fresh partition, configured everything through a chroot, and booted the new system. Took me 2 days to get to a point I was happy with. I really like void Linux. It boots faster, the init system is much simpler and I feel I understand it better than systemd already. The package manager is really good, and easy to use. I have no complaints.
For yourself, void Linux offers an xfce ready made live version, so everything is already configured and you can test it out in a live setup first with no permanent install. I didn't test the installer as did a manual install, however it is not a gui installer.
Not sure why you were downvoted, but Void Linux's TUI installer feels great to use, just as good as Alpine and *BSD out there. It really takes only five minutes to install and boot to your new system.
If I didn't get the down votes, id feel left out as almost every comment has at least 1.
Thanks for the info on the installer 👍
I think both Artix and Void have also said that they do not plan to implement age attestation. I haven't used Artix all that much aside from playing around with it in a vm, but i have daily driven Void for about 2 years total probably. Artix is probably the easiest to install if you choose the gui installer. Void has a guided ncurses installer and it isn't super difficult, but it does help if you have some experience with manually installing arch. In particular they'll ask you to format your drive using a cli tool. Void does offer an xfce image though, so once you get it installed you've got a gui ready to go. Runit is pretty simple to use. It uses shell scripts so that's something to keep in mind if you want to create a custom service, but other than that you basically just use ln -s commands to enable services, sv down to stop, and sv up to start a service.
Is there anything similar to aur for void linux?
Well they have xbps-src, which is often compared to the aur but it's not really the same thing. It doesn't provide any extra packages on top of the default repos, but it's their package build system that you can use to create package templates (so like pkgbuild files in arch) and build your own packages with them. If you look hard enough you can probably find other peoples templates out there though if they've put them on github or something.
and the third has stated they will not implement age attestation methods.
Do you have a source l, I went looking earlier and couldn't find anything
https://github.com/BryanLunduke/DoesItAgeVerify
endeavorOS is listed among those who have "decided not to age verify" but I will say the author of this page is a certifiable moron so take that with a grain of salt. Of all the distros listed and not implementing age verification, endeavorOS's seem the least explicit.
I'm really glad to hear that from Endeavour! I was on vanilla Arch for 10 years and been with CachyOS for the past year. But we have EndeavourOS on our kids computer and a laptop. I've been wary of Cachy now since how the mods have reacted to discussion about age verification And I would prefer to stick to something I know (although I'll be keeping Artix in my back pocket just in case).
We're a long way from January and we still don't really know what's going to happen outside of a few corporate distros.
I've recently spent a lot of time doing bare metal installs of a large number of non-systemd operating systems.
GhostBSD - Its BSD, so its stable and avoids the problems of Linux but supports less hardware especially 3D GPU's.
FreeBSD - as above but more effort to install & configure initially because its server oriented but makes a fine workstation nevertheless.
Alpine - Highly performant Linux oriented to container hosting but can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using nvidia except in nouveau driver.
Void - highly performant. more packages than Alpine. can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using anything but newest nvidia GPU's and even then strange unsolvable glitches.
Artix - look this is Arch with a non-systemd init (your choice of 3). Being Arch it inherits the repo's of bleeding edge packages but also inherits the heavy maintenance burden of Arch (if you know, you know). I'm just too bloody busy to baby sit an Arch install with all its nonsense.
Endeavour et al - wait for other OS's to implement work arounds to systemd's cancerous kowtowing to corporate America imposed surveillance laws.
Devuan - a drop in replacement for Debian. Inherits Debian's stability and ease of maintenance but with proven mature implementation of OpenRC init system.
The is the one I use for a calm happy life. To save time you can get a distro called 'Vendefoul Wolf Linux' which is Spanish in origin. Its a spin of Devuan but with a choice of GUI desktops and a GUI Calamares installer (the Devuan text mode TUI installer is fine, but whatever).
My daily driver is Vendefoul Wolf (Spanish for 'vengenance') LxQT desktop. Light, fast simple, stable. tip: download the 'weekly' iso's not the old 2025 ones.
honestly, It takes 10 minutes to have a fully working Void Linux install with plasma, pipewire, any GPU you want and most of common packages ( repos are indeed lacking compared to arch, but nothing unsolvable).
And yeah... Runs like a dream.
That has not been my experience. I wonder what magical source of information you possess to accomplish all that in ten minutes lol
Void documentation.I must admit it took me 3-4 tries to get it right,but last one was with btrfs subvolumes,so that one took a bit longer.
In any case, if you stick to the official documentation and don't lose yourself in multi case scenarios, you'll be fine.
WhatvI did was:
- install void (btrfs subvolumes are not supported by installer )
- Install zramen
- Install seatd
- Install plasma (which also installs necessary dependencies)
- install xdg-desktop-portal
- Install bluez and the BT profile package
- Copy pipewire and wireplumber conf to /etc - systemwide
- Ln .desktop files for pipewire
Fully working system.
Edit: I feel like I'm missing something but my memory's not that good as it used to be.
Edit2: oh yeah, don't forget to "ln -s /etc/sv/{service} /var/service" for dbus,seatd, sddm if you so wish, Bluetooth,etc.
Did you ask an LLM to write a comment full of cliches?
I have targeted three distros, Artix, Void Linux, and endeavorOS. The first two do not use systemd at all and the third has stated they will not implement age attestation methods.
how did you find this out; not specifically for these three but in general?
Not OP, but Ageless linux is the best resource that I found. It includes a list of distros that have officially said anything related with age verification.
for me, i'll find the closest arch to manjaro that simply does not rely on systemd
Are you saying Manjaro has a version without systemd? Intruiging. Do tell me more.
no, i'm saying that i think there's got to be an archlinux that is similar to manjaro in terms of what is offered but differs in not having systemd. i have not done the research to determine what distros (if any) this describes.