this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Ignoring the anti-GPL nature of Rust rewrites, it seems that it has been foolish to roll out rust-coreutils wholesale instead of perhaps an option to be selected while installing from the live image, which would almost certainly have lead to enthusiasts testing these utilities; and after enough data had been collected could then have been put in the main branch.

This bug report is old so it should have been fixed by now, but I wanted to commentate on rust-coreutils.

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[–] beanlover@hexbear.net 4 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

Ignoring the anti-GPL nature of Rust rewrites

Is there something wrong with Rust that I missed?

[–] trompete@hexbear.net 7 points 5 hours ago

This rewrite of coreutils is licensed under some non-copyleft license, whereas the GNU coreutils are obviously under GPL. Currently there are other Rust rewrite projects of various tools and libraries, and they all seem to be like that. There have long been folks who would rather get rid of GPL code, and various corporations are encouraging this. If at some point they succeed, they could make a fully proprietary userland and cause a very real setback to free software and user freedom.

[–] lurkerlady@hexbear.net 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

rust itself is quite good, licensing is a separate matter. its pretty trivial to make very snappy and efficient programs in rust due to how memory is handled. its generally also more secure, because again, the memory management is superb.

i love devving on rust its great. some orgs are ran by idiots that dont know much about licensing and dont do copyleft unfortunately

[–] mactan@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 hours ago

not rust itself, could be written in C with the wrong license

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 2 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

25.10 has been the buggiest version of Ubuntu in a while for me. I really gotta hop distros.


[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

im a ubuntu 24 LTS boy for my servarr/jellyfin box and have no complaints. my most reliable system, by far.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Same on my homelab, actually. I have no complaints there, its just my desktop thats been a mess. Some of it is, of course, being on a non-LTS version, but there are things that are broken now that were perfectly fine before 25.10.


[–] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

If you're okay with occasionally having to mess with stuff, come on over to arch. I recommend CachyOS for a well put-together distro.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

I appreciate the suggestion, but I have a desktop, laptop, and homelab all running Ubuntu atm so I think I would like to stay in the debian ecosystem for now. And while I know its not necessarily distro specific, I do like gnome a fair bit.


[–] trompete@hexbear.net 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

You'll be fine on vanilla Debian for basically all these things. If you need newer drivers or a newer version of some program, you can check the Debian backports repo; they recompile stuff from testing for stable. Includes newer kernels and bunch of other stuff. It will only install (and update) stuff you manually install from backports, the rest of the system stays on stable.

If that doesn't cut it, you can always run testing itself. Since packages migrate from unstable to testing (after like two weeks or so) only if they do not have serious bugs and all their dependencies are already met, testing is (basically) never in a broken state. If you put the codename, instead of "testing" in the sources.list, it'll just turn into stable when that's released. The backports are pretty safe also when upgrading, since they're never newer than testing or the next stable.

[–] lurkerlady@hexbear.net 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

you might like vanillaos or bazzite. vanillaos is an immutable distro like bazzite but based on debian. makes maintenance easier. i personally prefer bootc compatible distros because it makes distrohopping easier, but immutable distros in general are good for helping users abandon ship if a project becomes problematic.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 1 points 4 hours ago

I'll check it out, thanks!