System and Service Manager

systemd-clean (Privacy-Focused Fork)

This repository is a customized, privacy-hardened fork of systemd. It has been stripped of unnecessary bloatware, telemetry, and tracking vectors to bring it closer to traditional Unix philosophy—creating a pure, secure, and untrackable init system.

🚫 Key Privacy Features & Modifications

• Demographic Tracking Removed: Safely reverted PR #40954 (which introduced the birthDate field for age verification in userdb). The init system should absolutely never handle demographic user metadata.
• Ghost Machine-ID (Anti-Tracking): Bypassed all static /etc/machine-id, D-Bus, and firmware UUID reading mechanisms. The system now securely enforces an ephemeral, cryptographically random Machine-ID that lives purely in RAM for every single boot. Cross-reboot device fingerprinting is now mathematically impossible.
• Network Telemetry Severed: Heavily modified the build configuration to aggressively disable the remote journal feature by default, eliminating the backbone used for streaming binary logs over HTTP.
• Debloated Attack Surface: Hard-disabled non-essential, monolithic modules at build-time (systemd-homed, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved, systemd-timesyncd). The system no longer opens unnecessary ports, leaks DNS queries, or builds massive user metadata databases.

This is a clean, telemetry-free fork of the official systemd repository.

🛡️ Why this fork exists?

Recent updates to the upstream systemd core (specifically PR #40954) introduced mandatory logic for birthDate fields within JSON userdb records. This was implemented to act as an age verification data source for OS-level parental controls and external desktop portals based on regional regulations.

We believe that core system components (like PID 1 and userdb) should remain strictly focused on service/system management and should not act as data brokers for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or enforce age verification metrics.

🛠️ What has been changed?

• Reverted Age Verification / Telemetry: The merge commit acb6624fa1 has been fully and cleanly reverted from the main branch.
• All 199+ lines of code tying user records to birth dates and calendar event parsers have been purged.
• Upstream Compatible: Aside from the complete removal of the age tracking logic, this fork remains 100% identical to the upstream Linux systemd project, ensuring perfect compatibility without any privacy trade-offs.

🚀 Building

You can compile and install this fork exactly as you would the standard systemd: --bash meson setup build ninja -C build

Details

Most documentation is available on systemd's web site.

Assorted, older, general information about systemd can be found in the systemd Wiki.

Information about build requirements is provided in the README file.

Consult our NEWS file for information about what's new in the most recent systemd versions.

Please see the Code Map for information about this repository's layout and content.

Please see the Hacking guide for information on how to hack on systemd and test your modifications.

Please see our Contribution Guidelines for more information about filing GitHub Issues and posting GitHub Pull Requests.

When preparing patches for systemd, please follow our Coding Style Guidelines.

If you are looking for support, please contact our mailing list, join our IRC channel #systemd on libera.chat or Matrix channel

Stable branches with backported patches are available in the stable repo.

We have a security bug bounty program sponsored by the Sovereign Tech Fund hosted on YesWeHack

Repositories with distribution packages built from git main are available on OBS, and also repositories with packages built from the latest stable release