Regarding VPN being slow, two possibilities here:

1. They analyze internet packets, detect VPN connections and deliberately throttle them.
2. They just slow down anything that is not a common protocol (not http, https, ftp, …) that would make other things like torrent or even ssh session to be also equally slow.

If it is the first possibility, I know that OpenVPN with static key tend to be very difficult to detect if not impossible. Its also a bit faster but it has its cons that I encourage you to read about.

If it is the second possibility then you need to disguise your VPN traffic as https. I know its doable but I am fuzzy on the details.

I have started with Mandrake (later renamed to Mandriva) then went through few other distros before settling on Gentoo.

Gentoo installation is one of the most complicated because there is no installer, you do everything yourself.

This is like buying car parts and assembling them together into a car using a manufacturer’s manual. its painful but once the car is assembled you almost never have to take it to a repair shop. Not because it doesn’t breakdown but because you know well how it function and thus how to fix it yourself.

This is a law that companies are required to implement or stop making business in the states enforcing that law.

You probably feel that companies should just stop doing business in those states “to show them”. Sadly a lot of profitable Linux companies that fund Linux development disagree with your high morals. They want to continue doing business there.

Adding that field help those company comply with the law and doesn’t hurt you in anyway except maybe taking few bytes in your disk drive.

Even if the field is not added, those companies would come up with another place to store date of birth or even use systemd fork.

Its not like they will say since we can’t store date of birth in systemd’s user model then we’ll have to abandon this project and close our branches in those states instead.

I have read the git thread related to the merge request.

I don’t see what’s the big deal. You have a user model that already contain fields like user’s full name, location, … among others and all this developer did was adding yet another optional field called date of birth.

This does nothing to verify user’s age and enforce nothing. They’ve stressed that repeatedly in the comments.

What that does is making it easy for a Linux distro to store user’s birthday - should they wish to do so - and making that bit of info accessible to running apps so that each app can do what it wants with it.

User’s fullname and location are already there which are also optional so what’s the big deal?

If a Linux distro is based on Californa, I can understand but Linux distros are generally free and under no obligation to follow California’s law

what is the argument against using systemd?