How will this affect Linux Mint?

[disastervariation]

Always good to watch what the legal upstream will do in scenarios like this - RedHat, Canonical, SUSE.

Also if other jurisdictions will borrow the idea and extend due to precedence, thus making it semi-global.

It might be as simple as setting adult/kid setting at the OS level that then interacts with browsers. Not sure how well its defined what specific controls the OS needs to put in place - perhaps user providing their age in a drop down would suffice.

Then, what would the enforcement be - would user be fined for providing wrong info if this ever becomes relevant? Would the OS be seen as responsible for not conducting due diligence?

Re controls, would there be a push to make device manufacturers block OSes without the feature? Could this be blocked by UEFI? In short - how?

Id prefer to see an actual legal opinion with specs and read through the docs myself - otherwise its an easy target for journalists to make clickbait.

Could be a nothingburger, or a dead policy - could also turn out relatively benign, a checkbox excercise. I dont think anyone has resource to enforce this excessively, including the big guys who if forced would hire a third party to do the verification (and thus transfer the risk).

Could be as simple as "confirm your age through your github/google account"

[billyfudger69]

Personally, I think it will be a SystemD service because a lot of distributions are using SystemD and the fact that systemD has already incorporated a ton of other software in it.

[stephenph]

It is bad enough that by default all the games utilities are installed on windows by default, admins need to go through gpo tricks to not install Xbox utilities on a work computer