What problem does this even solve? On Linux, what app would even be asking how old you are? Web browsers for sure, and maybe electron apps like Discord? But what else is there?
I’m on Bazzite (based on Fedora). I’m comfy with it, moving distros is a significant effort, so I’m very unlikely to ever jump ship. If I have to make a workflow that mirrors the official Bazzite images and neuters this age check, so be it. Not that complicated.
But I’m willing to bet the community will step up and maintain browsers/apps that don’t have these age checks in the first place. Firefox has many forks that definitely won’t, and Vesktop will probably stub this out when it inevitably comes to Discord. If there’s nothing to ask for age verification, it doesn’t matter what the OS can do.
I really don’t see a need to burn a distro I’m comfortable with, even if the upstream maintainers are a little dumb. There a ton of ways to bend a Linux distro to your will without throwing your hands up.
What problem does this even solve? On Linux, what app would even be asking how old you are? Web browsers for sure, and maybe electron apps like Discord? But what else is there?
I’m on Bazzite (based on Fedora). I’m comfy
well, the app catalog, steam, certain games, …
tbh parental controls would be useful to have. you can’t be watching every minute if they are doing something inappropriate. usage time limits are also useful.
why are people so much against tools? we are so afraid of the slippery slope that we don’t even consider to accept legitimately useful optional tools
can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children? now, you either properly set up limits for them, or cut their access, if you want any good.
All Linux distros either come with parental controls or have a way of installing them. This age verification shit was never about protecting the children.
But it has some serious limitations: for example, you cannot block individual website reliably. Parents can consider piholes, but DNS sink hole on local network are often trivial to bypass.
this is just limiting what apps can be opened, and it only works for flatpak apps. how will you disable all the other apps that are installed? how do you disable the shell which could be used to download a non-flatpak browser?
and as you said it does not even try to limit which websites are allowed to be visited, or for how much time can the computer be used. a pihole can be circumvented with DoH, for which there is an easy toggle in firefox, probably chrome too
of course, but no root permission is needed for that. flatpak packages can be installed on the user level, but even if you somehow disable that, they could still just download firefox (or anything else) as a tarball, unpack it and run it traditionally
What problem does this even solve? On Linux, what app would even be asking how old you are? Web browsers for sure, and maybe electron apps like Discord? But what else is there?
I’m on Bazzite (based on Fedora). I’m comfy with it, moving distros is a significant effort, so I’m very unlikely to ever jump ship. If I have to make a workflow that mirrors the official Bazzite images and neuters this age check, so be it. Not that complicated.
But I’m willing to bet the community will step up and maintain browsers/apps that don’t have these age checks in the first place. Firefox has many forks that definitely won’t, and Vesktop will probably stub this out when it inevitably comes to Discord. If there’s nothing to ask for age verification, it doesn’t matter what the OS can do.
I really don’t see a need to burn a distro I’m comfortable with, even if the upstream maintainers are a little dumb. There a ton of ways to bend a Linux distro to your will without throwing your hands up.
well, the app catalog, steam, certain games, …
tbh parental controls would be useful to have. you can’t be watching every minute if they are doing something inappropriate. usage time limits are also useful.
why are people so much against tools? we are so afraid of the slippery slope that we don’t even consider to accept legitimately useful optional tools
can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children? now, you either properly set up limits for them, or cut their access, if you want any good.
All Linux distros either come with parental controls or have a way of installing them. This age verification shit was never about protecting the children.
when I was looking I have found exactly zero parental controls for linux. which ones do you know?
Gnome has parental control https://help.gnome.org/gnome-help/parental-controls.html
But it has some serious limitations: for example, you cannot block individual website reliably. Parents can consider piholes, but DNS sink hole on local network are often trivial to bypass.
this is just limiting what apps can be opened, and it only works for flatpak apps. how will you disable all the other apps that are installed? how do you disable the shell which could be used to download a non-flatpak browser?
and as you said it does not even try to limit which websites are allowed to be visited, or for how much time can the computer be used. a pihole can be circumvented with DoH, for which there is an easy toggle in firefox, probably chrome too
Don’t give your kids root permission so they can’t install non-flatpak apps.
of course, but no root permission is needed for that. flatpak packages can be installed on the user level, but even if you somehow disable that, they could still just download firefox (or anything else) as a tarball, unpack it and run it traditionally