That’s definitely false. Even in the most complex case, there’s always nixpkgs-unfree.
We can argue about how easy anything nix related is to use, but the implementation would be fairly trivial.
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TL;DR even if NixOS doesn’t enforce age verification (which I hope it doesn’t) I think this will definitely impact NixOS/applications in nixpkgs.
Been thinking about the potential impact for application packaging in nixpkgs with the below comment from 7c6f434c
My bet is that we will package whatever
libagebracketbecomes required dependency of Chromium for that purpose.
I definitely agree that browsers seem to me like an obvious future enforcement point for this. I imagine that popular libraries will emerge in various languages to solve this problem and that packages in nixpkgs will have to be updated for those applications/libraries to build successfully.
Additionally, I have found the Ubuntu Mailing list entry on this interesting for understanding what a potential implementation might look like: On the unfortunate need for an “age verification” API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states
The proposed solution:
I’d like to propose a “hybrid” approach; introduce a new standard D-Bus interface, `org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1`, that can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit. AccountsService could implement this API so that newer versions of distros will get the relevant features for free, while distros with an AccountsService too old to contain the feature can implement it themselves as a stop-gap solution.
Since Ubuntu/Canonical and Red Hat maintain much of the modern Linux desktop stack – even if NixOS doesn’t enforce age reporting (which I hope it never does/has to) – I imagine that if these things become standardized there is no way that these things won’t impact any modern Linux distribution.
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I mean, yeah, but the extent of that impact will be a new ageVerificationEnabled option to services.accounts-daemon that does next to nothing. I don’t see this becoming a problem NixOS really has to care about.
In theory nixpkgs would need to grow some metadata and make nsfw stuff not evaluate by default, but frankly it’s probably cheaper for any US-based laptop vendors to pay the 10K fine if someone notices the one Californian kid running a laptop that came pre-loaded with NixOS. If they include a “not suitable for children in California” sticker, maybe it’s just 2.5K.
Even if someone goes out of their way to actually try to implement this, the impact would just be a new meta attribute that is mildly useful if you want nix to warn you when someone marks their package as NSFW.
From a technical perspective, the impact on NixOS is practically nil. From a user perspective, the impact is also nil; even in the US the dbus API will most likely return 18+ for every NixOS user.
The wider societal impact is a different story, but that has very little to do directly with Linux distros.
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I’ve only recently started using desktops at all until very recently and, finding them generally disagreeable, I’m very likely going to forego them again. Do we see the surface tooling being confined to the desktop layers?
Self-reported age declaration, per se, is arguably defensible (though I don’t make that case). My concern is the precedent this sets. It feels like the beginnings of a general auto-doxing mechanism. At the very least, I’d hope there are ways of explicitly monitoring what is about to be shared, with whom, and by what.
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The proposal adds it to the AccountsService DBus service, which is only enabled if you use a DE (or a glossy login manager like lightdm). I can see a world in which applications will start treating your user as being 12 by default if that service isn’t running, though.
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I don’t see this becoming a problem NixOS really has to care about.
Completely agreed.
That being said, I’m of the disposition where if it’s possible/not difficult to strip out age verification from things pulled in like dbus, I’d prefer that being the default on my systems. But, if it’s sitting there unused, then oh well. 
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Tech journalist Bryan Lunduke reports that OS level age verification is required by law in Brazil from 17th of March 2026. So i guess, in roughly 2 weeks we’ll see whether there are any consequences for open source projects not complying with such laws. Apparently this goes beyond self reporting…