Per the very first reply on their thread discussing it in their forums, which I linked directly to for the post title:
We’ll NEVER require any verification or identification from the user.
However, what’s gonna happen should the attempts to age-gate the XDG portal screw over alt-init distros like Artix too? My guess is maybe they start blocking regions which force age gating like Arch Linux 32 is doing.


In this case Artix already is a systemd-free distro, but this is part of why i think it’s a bad idea that systemd is wanting to implement the age verification crap, cause i think the distro should be allowed to decide if they want to comply or not. Feels like distros that use systemd will be forced to comply unless they change init, which is probably a pain in of itself.
Btw, what does the desktop portal actually do? I’ve installed a lot of programs over the years, including flatpaks, and i never seemed to need it. I hope it stays that way considering they’re implementing this shit too.
Systemd isn’t implementing age verification.
They added the ability to store the data because the xdg-desktop-portal team added the ability to set an age and that requires a place to store the data. No component ‘verifies’ the age, it’s a data field that you can enter whatever you’d like into.
From https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 :
Sure, but they both seem way too eager for my taste to go along with this nonsense, and if you refuse to implement this, you don’t need a place to store it either. I suppose it’s nice for the distros that do want to use it.
Based on what? They have specifically addressed the issue and it does not read like they’re eager to have this forced on them by state laws.
https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification
Where do I install an Ageless-style patch to force flagrant non-compliance?