Clem talks about that in the comments. What are some no hassle, Debian based, rustless distros as alternative to Mint?
Why is this a problem?
The main problem is that it’s just not battle tested like GNU coreutils are. And Canonical has only tested this in one cycle, 25.10, before introducing it in an LTS. Would’ve made more sense to wait until 26.10.
Other find problem with it being MIT licensed.
The main problem is that it’s just not battle tested like GNU coreutils are.
Mint is the last distro that would push something that isn’t battle tested. IIRC they haven’t even started working on Wayland support.
Have you read Clem’s comment?
One issue with this is that uutils is licensed under the MIT license, instead of coreutils’ GPL license. In fact, for reasons I don’t quite understand many of these rust rewrites are licensed with the MIT license. This will contribute to long term erosion of the rights granted by the GPL to software projects and users.
In fact, for reasons I don’t quite understand many of these rust rewrites are licensed with the MIT license.
I think it’s pretty obvious. Corpos are doing the EEE approach in the Linux ecosystem.
Yeah, the ‘for reasons I don’t quite understand’ bit was intended slightly sarcastically.
It’s bad that we’re in an all-time low percentage of politically minded Linux users, in another era Rust would never be close to the Linux kernel or would pose as a threat to GNU/GPL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG2ZMvBT8W4
4:25
(sorry my third party youtube frontend can’t share timestamp links)
tldw:
- more CVEs than the old core utils that have been tested and in prod for over 30years
- no feature parity, so existing stuff that uses them will suddenly misbehave, when certain flags are missing
- different license, MIT instead of copyleft, so it’s more friendly for companies to use it for profit, while abusing the work of volunteer contributors
FYI you can put &t=265 on the end of the URL for the timestamp.
Its two fold for many (not for me): Rust and MIT
Well, what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle, maybe, but if you have prior Linux experience, you’ll be fine.
what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle
What hassle? Genuinely curious.
Well, for example, upgrading between releases is done by manually editing
sources.listand some other steps, and there’s no easy tool for that. This is not difficult, exactly, but for people with little experience it’s a bit daunting. Debian in general isn’t the most new user friendly distro, in my experience. Distros like Mint and Ubuntu make the Debian experience slightly easier. Not that Debian is some esoteric system.
LMDE comes to mind
what advantage does it have over stock debian…?
All the nice bells and whistles that mint comes with: mostly cinnamon and the upgrade manager out-of-the-box. I’ve been using it for a few months, and I prefer it over stock debian and normal mint.
I prefer it over stock debian and normal mint.
I normally run debian but I ran LMDE for a couple years and thought it was nice.
If you like running a Linux Mint workstation, its mostly the same but built on Debian instead of Ubuntu. It came from their goal of making a version of Mint that doesn’t have any dependencies on Ubuntu.
afaik, it just looks prettier and gets Cinnamon sooner if you use that.
It still has all the normal debian quirks.
There is the Mint version that is based directly on Debian, instead of Ubuntu: LMDE
I haven’t used it myself, maybe someone with actual experience can comment on it.
The comment itself:
[…] Rust-coreutils does affect us. This is something we definitely see as part of the base so even though we would prefer for coreutils not to change, we’re hoping to align with Ubuntu on this. We’re concerned with regressions. New code almost always introduces regressions. That’s a lot of new code on very important components. I was shocked to see rust-coreutils updated from 0.7 to 0.8 just days before the stable release of Ubuntu 26.04. It actually broke something important on our side. We fixed it. I’m sure Ubuntu will update it whenever new regressions are found. We’ll see.
