Here's my suggestion for an implementation strategy:
- Keep the "Next" button greyed out until you add three forms of identification.
- Ask the user to take photos of their 3 forms of ID with a webcam. Ask the user to hold them in increasingly bizarre poses -- left hand, right hand, woven between your fingers, behind your ear, between your toes.
- Add an "accessibility" button. This button pops up a text box that advises you if you can't comply because you don't have hands, ears, feet or whatever (hey, some people don't and that's perfectly fine!) you can just use a picture of somebody else's body parts, and helpfully provides a menu of AI-generated pictures of human ears, hands, etc. for you to copy-paste.
- To preserve privacy, send the actual photos to /dev/null.
- The "verify the photo of my ID" button should check whether random.random() < 0.8. On average the user will require 5 tries per photo, or 15 tries total.
- Add a checkbox that says "I am not in the state of California". Upon clicking this checkbox the "OK" button becomes not grayed out and you can proceed without completing the identity checking process.
- If the user does not seem to have a webcam installed, all UI elements are grayed out except the "I am not in the state of California" checkbox.
- The list of acceptable identification shall be: Driver's license, learner's permit, Social Security card, library card, school identification, Boy / Girl Scout membership card, school yearbook photo, Burger King Kid's Club membership card, utility bill, ISP bill, Burger King receipt, Mahalo Rewards card, any receipt paid via credit card, a photo of a printout of any email from OnlyFans, a photo of a DNS TXT record containing the string "CALIFORNIA", a photo of your X account with a blue check mark.
Let's post the mailing list link directly? https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04...
Protecting the impressionable from snaps and Canonical is of utmost importance.
What's next? Redirecting local searches to Amaz... oh.
Community planning another derivative
Any linux distro that implements it, will probably lose all desktop users
False.
Not only normies are going to provide all the IDs asked along with anus scans, but they sincerely do not understand what's wrong with that.
I would agree with you given we were talking about MacOS or Windows. Who knows, that may come later. If this was a more consumer-focused niche linux distro like SteamOS, I would also be concerned for the same reason.
But this is a general purpose desktop linux distro. A common, beginners-choice option, but still an option placing the user in a pretty rare breed. This isn't to game cheaply on a Steam Deck they bought, this is a choice to either build a PC ignoring the buy prompts for "Remember the windows license!", or choosing to overwrite the preinstalled OS on your laptop/PC.
The venn diagram of anus-scan-accepters and regular ubuntu users is simply two distant circles.
They're not asking for IDs. The user simply has to declare their age. I'm not happy about any of this, but there is no "verification."
It sure sounds like there's no liability if the user lies: "An operating system provider or a covered application store that makes a good faith effort to comply with this title, taking into consideration available technology and any reasonable technical limitations or outages, shall not be liable for an erroneous signal indicating a user's age range..."
And how many of them are using desktop Linux?
I'm sure this whole Ubuntu issue is controversial but we really shouldn't be spreading Lunduke posts after the kind of character he has turned out to be.
He's a big panderer to the right wing conspiracy nuts + the "anti woke" crowd.
Dear Ubuntu:
Go fuck yourself.
So much this.
Unfortunately, others will follow because most are spineless.