June 21, 2026
Liberated systemd is a fork that reverts systemd’s new optional birthDate support in user records, citing privacy concerns.
As you probably know, in mid-March, the upstream systemd change adds an optional birthDate field to user records. According to the related commit, the field stores a user’s date of birth in ISO 8601 format, meaning YYYY-MM-DD. The change also updates homectl, documentation, user-record parsing, output handling, and tests.
Additionally, the commit notes that systemd user records already support other personal metadata fields, including email address, real name, and location. For the Liberated systemd author, however, adding birth date support crosses a line because of its possible connection to age-verification systems.
The project’s scope is intentionally narrow: it only removes birth date support and otherwise remains aligned with upstream systemd. The README states Liberated systemd will not add new features, bug fixes, security patches, or optimizations. According to the developer, liberated systemd exists only to remove changes the author considers surveillance-related.
Personally I applaud this development and home the majority of OS’s adopt it.