Various new laws in the U.S., such as the "Assembly Bill 1043" in California, as well as the "Senate Bill 26-051" in Colorado and the "Senate Bill S8102A" in New York, could purely theoretically oblige providers of operating systems to verify the age of users. Since CachyOS is a free open source project without a company headquarters in the USA, the feasibility alone is not given. In the forum of the gaming distribution, a moderator has now commented on the topic.

CachyOS is based in Germany, with founders in Germany and Russia. Laws on age verification do not exist there.

So the bottom line is: CachyOS does nothing in terms of age verification.

CachyOS uses the SystemD framework. There are no plans to stop using it or use an alternative. CachyOS does not implement anything to do with age verification via SystemD. SystemD does not even have age verification.

So the bottom line is: there is no age verification with SystemD.

— Moderator in the forum of CachyOS

The concern of the Linux community is that free developers could be legally prosecuted if they offer their software for download in these US states without including the corresponding queries. However, since CachyOS is a free project from Germany and has no headquarters in the USA, the developers currently see no legal basis or necessity to implement these US regulations. In the official Discussion forum Several threads have already had to be closed due to repeated inquiries about the topic.

Age verification:

    CachyOS is not located in areas where this is an issue.
    CachyOS is not taking any steps in this regard.

SystemD:

    CachyOS uses SystemD.
    If you do not want to use SystemD, find a different distribution.

STOP asking for these two things.
STOP attacking people for these two things.
STOP being radical on these two issues.

Should anything ever change in these two things, there will be a corresponding announcement.

— Moderator in the forum of CachyOS

The discussions have recently increased, since in the system, an Init system, which also includes CachyOS, an optional field called birthDate in the JSON structure of the user database (Userb) was recorded. This amendment (Pull Request #40954) serves as the technical foundation for the aforementioned laws, but does not itself carry out any active testing. The development team at Garuda Linux is also involved Officially Expressed.

Garuda Linux will not introduce age verification measures because the jurisdictions to which Garuda Linux is subject do not have laws requiring an age check.

— Garuda Linux

An enforceability of the laws also on open source projects, especially outside the USA, is considered highly unlikely by experts and developers. Many distributions have also already confirmed that they will not include age verification.

The editorial team of PCGH has once again asked Peter Jung, the chief developer of CachyOS, for a detailed statement on this topic and will update this report accordingly.