4/22/26

California, Brazil, and Arch Linux

This post (?) was supposed to be about the RAM crisis, but I forgot about it for two months, so here we are.

California recently passed a bill, backed by Meta, that requires operating system "providers" to collect the age of their users during account setup, and to provide an API for applications to access the rough age bracket of users. The idea being that certain services would be blocked or allowed for people under or over the ages of 4, 13, 16, and 18. All this goes into effect on January 1st 2027. Brazil passed a similar law effectively requiring the same thing, and requiring that users actually verify their age for operating systems, app stores, social media, games, and "any software likely to be accessed by minors." For more info, see agelesslinux.org. I'm not a huge fan of their whole deal, but they're a good source of information about similar legislation and different Linux maintainers' reactions.

Even though I don't live in California or Brazil, the changes that are going to be made will affect me. They will not, however, affect people not using Linux. Microsoft, Apple, and Google are already collecting your age when you sign up for an online account with them, which tend to be required for their operating systems. Linux does not, but open source projects are gonna have to decide soon whether or not they're going to give in to continue being legally usable for the roughly 3% of the world's population that lives in California or Brazil. One such project is systemd, the init system for the majority of Linux distros people actually care about. They have decided to comply, merging a birthDate field in user records into main. This is bad. Systemd complying could very well mean age tracking in the majority of distributions that use it.

Unrelated to this, and in a series of events I don't care to recount, I switched my daily use computers from Kubuntu Linux to Arch, and thanks to new legislation, legislation that does not apply where I live mind you, I may have to switch once again to a distro without systemd. I don't consider myself the distrohopper type. I've tried a few out, but I'm not rapidly switching everything up for no reason. Thanks to Meta's beautiful corporate greed and the genius of California, however, I may become one, since every distro I do use is systemd based.

Arch is pretty cool though. Pacman and the AUR are so much less annoying than APT and PPAs. Archinstall was stabler than I thought it would be, so I used it for all my devices. I tried a manual install on a virtual machine, which was easier than expected. Thanks ArchWiki! Most of the problems I experienced on Arch have been caused by missing some package. OBS virtual camera didn't work at one point because I didn't have the linux-headers package installed for some reason, and installing it fixed it instantly. That, more or less, is how every problem goes. It's been great so far.

I had some plan to connect these two topics, but I haven't touched this page in 4 days, and I forgot, so whatever. Call your representatives if you care about digital privacy, and try Arch Linux if you're a big nerd.