AccountsService is the GNOME/systemd service that manages local user account data. It would be a natural home for age bracket fields, but it has not been formally proposed for this purpose.
No one has formally proposed adding age data to AccountsService. This page documents why it was considered and why the D-Bus proposal went in a different direction.
AccountsService (accounts-daemon) is a D-Bus service that provides a
system-level interface for managing user accounts. It stores per-user data such as display
name, profile photo, language preferences, and login frequency. On GNOME-based systems, it's
the canonical source for user metadata.
User data is stored in plain-text key-value files under
/var/lib/AccountsService/users/, with one file per user named after the username.
Adding age bracket support would likely mean adding a new key to these files — something like
AgeBracket=4.
Aaron Rainbolt explicitly chose not to build age reporting into AccountsService. His reasoning:
Modifying AccountsService would require patching and releasing a new version of an established system service. For distributions with stable releases — Debian in particular — this means either backporting the patch to every supported release or waiting for the next major version. A standalone D-Bus service can be packaged and shipped independently, immediately, on any release.
David Edmundson (KDE developer), responding on the debian-devel thread, described
AccountsService as "effectively obsolete" — being supplanted by systemd's
userdb and homed services. Building compliance infrastructure
on top of a service that may be deprecated adds technical debt.
AccountsService is primarily a GNOME component. While it runs on other desktops, it's not universally present. A cross-distro standard needs to work on systems without GNOME infrastructure — headless servers, embedded devices, tiling window manager setups, and non-GNOME desktops.
Despite the D-Bus proposal going in a different direction, GNOME could independently decide to add age fields to AccountsService. If this happens:
/var/lib/AccountsService/users/USERNAMEorg.freedesktop.Accounts would gain age-related propertiesAgeless Linux will provide removal instructions. The fix would involve either deleting the age field from the per-user file, replacing AccountsService with a patched version that omits age support, or masking the relevant D-Bus properties. The specifics depend on how the integration is implemented.
For reference, the AccountsService per-user files live at:
/var/lib/AccountsService/users/USERNAME
A typical file looks like:
[User] Language=en_US.UTF-8 XSession=gnome SystemAccount=false
If age fields are added, they would likely appear in this format — a simple key-value pair that can be edited or removed with standard text tools.