I want to start feeling out future distros for me once the age attestation makes its way into systemd. I am currently using Fedora on two computers, one I use for gaming (all AMD) and one I use for getting work done (thinkpad x13). I am pretty bummed about this because I feel quite settled in with Fedora, but with all the talk of age attestation happening I will be withdrawing my consent from using distros that intend to comply with these laws.
I have targeted three distros, Artix, Void Linux, and endeavorOS. The first two do not use systemd at all and the third has stated they will not implement age attestation methods.
I am thinking endeavorOS might be a good move, I appreciate an out of the box solution. I can and have installed Arch manually several times, but I prefer to spend my time using my computer, not necessarily going into the “rice” rabbit hole. I will probably use a desktop environment like KDE, GNOME, or XFCE.
I guess the point of this post is: anyone who has experience with systemd-free distros like Void or Artix, what are your thoughts using as a general purpose operating system? how is the learning curve coming from systemd? Can someone who is technologically competent but not particularly interested in deep customization (I am a sysadmin, but I just like my shit to work) thrive in this type of environment? I use Fedora because it’s a good mix of being generally unassuming but having sensible defaults and being extraordinarily well supported.
Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Feel free to give me any thoughts you may have on the subject of age attestation or even suggest distros I might not be aware of.
and the third has stated they will not implement age attestation methods.
Do you have a source l, I went looking earlier and couldn’t find anything
https://github.com/BryanLunduke/DoesItAgeVerify
endeavorOS is listed among those who have “decided not to age verify” but I will say the author of this page is a certifiable moron so take that with a grain of salt. Of all the distros listed and not implementing age verification, endeavorOS’s seem the least explicit.
We’re a long way from January and we still don’t really know what’s going to happen outside of a few corporate distros.
I’m tempering the systemd thing as I do feel it is somewhat getting blown out of proportion. Though I did try some non systemd distros in a VM over the last week.
A bigger issue for me is this push to embrace AI. It seems all the American tech companies are jumping on board and Red Hat is no exception.
I want to love Fedora but this is the last straw for me.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/31/red_hat_ai_dev/
Essentially any distro with funding primarily from US tech companies is going to go to shit. It’s only a matter of time.
I do run EndeavourOS on my main PC and it’s pretty great. I have not seen any statement regarding their position on the age attestation crap. I’ll jump ship if they come out in favour of it. I just hope they do not.
I’m less twitchy on the AI thing. CEO’s gonna CEO, and I think this whole AI thing is going to quietly die down. It’s just… not as useful as the people pushing it says it is. You can’t just mass-delusion people into thinking something does what it doesn’t do. It writes bad code. It is insecure. It makes people insane. These are facts. The tech is not improving.
Not to mention, I find the Register quite often to be a bit too-cute-by-half in its “reporting”. We’ll see.
I think it’s too early to be making decisions based on this alone.
But it’s a good time to put /home on a separate partition and make backups of files you edited in /etc so you can switch distros quickly.
Fair point, but I think at this point it’s extremely likely Fedora will comply, and my issue with this is ideological, not practical. I will not use a distribution that complies with this law because I believe it is morally compromised.
💪 🤝
I agree.
As far as I know, most distros are waiting. I heard debian is doing that (people say their org structure makes them unable to satisfy it), lead dev of pclinuxos said it might be a “nothingburger”, the distros who said “no plans” are doing that, etc.
We might get the “stack” in place before distros do anything. Only a few distros refused outright so far, even less are trying to comply.
I think we might linger in this limbo for a long-long time, and the distros might only decide when websites start requiring and API (or when they get taken down by authorities).
I think both Artix and Void have also said that they do not plan to implement age attestation. I haven’t used Artix all that much aside from playing around with it in a vm, but i have daily driven Void for about 2 years total probably. Artix is probably the easiest to install if you choose the gui installer. Void has a guided ncurses installer and it isn’t super difficult, but it does help if you have some experience with manually installing arch. In particular they’ll ask you to format your drive using a cli tool. Void does offer an xfce image though, so once you get it installed you’ve got a gui ready to go. Runit is pretty simple to use. It uses shell scripts so that’s something to keep in mind if you want to create a custom service, but other than that you basically just use
ln -scommands to enable services,sv downto stop, andsv upto start a service.Is there anything similar to aur for void linux?
Well they have xbps-src, which is often compared to the aur but it’s not really the same thing. It doesn’t provide any extra packages on top of the default repos, but it’s their package build system that you can use to create package templates (so like pkgbuild files in arch) and build your own packages with them. If you look hard enough you can probably find other peoples templates out there though if they’ve put them on github or something.
for me, i’ll find the closest arch to manjaro that simply does not rely on systemd
