this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
336 points (97.7% liked)

Linux

63889 readers
932 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

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;
[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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...