Has openSUSE released an official announcement regarding those age verification bills that California, Colorado, Brazil etc are trying to enforce?
Will openSUSE include the systemd release that contains this verification in the upcoming updates?
How does this affect European or other non-US or non-Brazilian users?
Thank you.
@alexsec there is NO verification in systemd, it’s all FUD! All that was done was add a field for birth date for folks to use if required.
Note there is an age restriction already in openSUSE Terms and Conditions… 
I didn’t know about this age restriction. I posted this so that we, or I, can understand what will happen.
I think that the real question here is not so much about the terms of use that already exist but rather if they will be enforced by the distribution(s).
Of course at this point, this question is useless, as nothing is being enforced anywhere. As @malcolmlewis pointed out, the new systemd field is just an addition to a barrage of already existing fields for information like name, address, phone number etc - pretty invasive already and nobody has ever been required to fill them in - what is one more field going to change?
I think the reason this has been going around and causing a lot of mayhem in a lot of other distro communities is because people see this as a gradual shift, where first they add a field, then they add a screen to Calamares or whatever is used during installation, then all of a sudden the screen is asking you to verify that you’re telling the truth about the date there by uploading your real life IDs…
As we all know, the wider Linux community tends to get very heated, and often quite toxic, about ideological issues. Personally, I don’t think the issue is with any distro maintainers. Nobody wants the slippery slope. What happened to the developer who submitted the original systems pull request is simply abhorrent: nobody deserves doxxing, death threats, and a bunch of food ordered to their home. Especially for a pull request (okay, a series of pull requests).
It really comes down to the cold hard reality of whether the distro has to comply with the laws for any reason, or not. If it does, it will be implemented. If it does not, it won’t. Do we know more at this point? No, we have to wait and see. So I think the issue is not ideological but simply legal. It’s easy to crash out and be loud and nasty about this, when you don’t have to cover your own back from potentially serious legal consequences. So that’s what people do.
Sorry for the long rant.
This has nothing to do with ideology.
No one – not even an operating system, and certainly not Linux – should pave the way for surveillance fantasies. In any way whatsoever. Not in the slightest.
No one!
Because that is exactly what it is.
Here is some overview of the status of Linux distributions due to age verification bills:
Oh, absolutely. I 100% agree with you. But it is ideology, just like the belief that “I’ve got nothing to hide” is an ideology. I don’t mean anything bad by that word. I live by the same privacy ideology. I think all of us here do.
My point was that the anger directed at Linux is misplaced. The anger should be directed at the government officials that pass this legislation. Action must be taken politically in relevant jurisdictions. Not via bullying online.
If anything, people should be more concerned with Apple already rolling out actual mandatory “age” verification on iOS in places like Britain. And same with Google’s Android. Those two are way ahead of Linux in terms of ire they should be feeling. And most of us have a phone running one of those 2 OSs. That goes everywhere with us. Aaanyway…
With regards to an official announcement, check news.openesuzse.org for any relevant updates. Any official news from the project is released through those channels.
LOL, just got back from a week back in the Midwest with family, allergies + sinus infection + on my phone with autocorrect. I thought I fixed it, clearly not all the way.
Thanks for the assist.
https://agelesslinux.github.io/age-reporting/distro-specific.html
look:
openSUSE / SUSE
SilentNo discussion found on any official mailing list, forum, or blog.
systemd (upstream)
MergedPR #40954 was merged on March 18, 2026, adding a birthDate field (YYYY-MM-DD) to systemd’s JSON user records. The PR explicitly cites AB 1043, CO SB 26-051, and Lei 15.211 as motivation. The field stores exact dates of birth, not brackets. It is readable by any process querying userdb and writable only by administrators via homectl.
This is the data layer for the emerging age verification stack. It coordinates with AccountsService MR #176 and xdg-desktop-portal PR #1922. Merged by a systemd maintainer.
Because systemd is the init system on essentially every major Linux distribution, this commit affects the entire ecosystem — not just distributions that choose to comply.
freedesktop.org D-Bus Proposal
ClosedAaron Rainbolt’s merge request to add org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1 to the XDG specifications has been closed. Community pushback cited reputational risk of associating a core desktop standard with politically sensitive regulation. Rainbolt indicated future work would move into the portal infrastructure used by technologies such as Flatpak. The interface specification itself remains relevant — the question is where it will be hosted, not whether it will be attempted.
Source: linuxiac.com
…for comparisson, Debian which is very, very community driven:
Debian
DiscussingThe debian-devel mailing list has seen 30+ messages on age verification compliance, with the thread active through March 10. The community is split into four camps:
Comply minimally — Rainbolt and Fore advocate shipping the D-Bus proposal as an optional package
Modular/removable package — Jamie Null and North-Keys argue compliance should be a package that users can remove without breaking the system
Do nothing — Heuser and Stoutner argue Debian has no obligation to comply with a single state’s law
Satirical opposition — FloofyWolf created systemd-censord, a mock compliance packageAlex North-Keys (March 8) posted a detailed argument that anonymity protects children better than age verification, and that building age infrastructure into the OS undermines the privacy of the users it claims to protect.
No General Resolution has been proposed. No DPL statement has been issued.
Which is precisely what I said - when there’s an announcement, it’ll be on news.o.o - no need to go looking at third party sites to see if anyone’s said anything official for the project.
Well, it’s not about “looking at third party sites to see if anyone’s said anything official for the project”, i.e. openSUSE/SUSE in this case, but that site mentioned shows what several distributions and projects (like systemd) are doing (or not doing) currently.
I guess it interesting somehow to see how diverse the discussion is at Debian, how far has gone MidnightBSD already(!!) and what has happened at openSUSE/SUSE (i.e. “nothing” at all, so far).
Of course, I could follow news.o.o … and I do so. But, in some case I might switch the distro, and so I can see where possibly to — or not. Said “might switch” — not “will/must doing this”…
Right, I was commenting specifically on what you quoted me as saying.
The question specifically was about if openSUSE has made an announcement, and I pointed the OP at where to look for any official announcements. End of story.
How much choice does opensuse even have in this regard? I’d expect that SUSE will comply and implement age verification in whatever unforseeable way, given that they need to stay legally viable to business customers in the affected areas and the general equivalence between suse and opensuse would cause that code to end up in Tumbleweed, Leap, etc. as well.
What I’d like to know is this: Assuming SUSE, as a business, will comply fully, would the opensuse distros ship with the exact same mechanisms or would it be “cut out”? Just for unaffected areas depending on the localization settings supplied to the installer? Just a Terms of Use addition about the user being responsible for ensured compliance with local laws, or a not for use in california label or something? Shipping with age verification enabled but allowing the user to uninstall it?
Not having discussed this internally yet or just not yet having any information to share would also be fine, which is admittedly implied by your “check for official announcements”-reply, but given how hot this topic currently is and how strong opinions on it are, sharing as much info as possible could help calm people down a bit.
That discussion, when it happens, will likely happen on the project mailing list.
These forums are generally user-to-user support; project-level discussions happen on that ML.
So that’s probably a better place to ask.
It’s not like I (or anyone in this discussion, really) have any more information than you do, or any more access to those who will be involved in the discussion. I’m not “holding back” information about this.
There’s nothing, absolutely nothing to discuss.
If SUSE or openSUSE were to force this feature on users, that would be the end of SUSE. Definitely!!!
There’s bound to be a distro that hasn’t included this monitoring capability.
thanks for the answer. to be clear, I was not accusing you of anything malicious and never intended to imply that either. I understand how that quoted sentenced could be interpreted in this way though, I could’ve phrased that better.
Understood. To be clear, I didn’t think you were, but making it clear for others reading here is something I’ve learned over the years is important, just so there’s no misunderstanding. 