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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

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Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#281

Post by LtWorf »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #272
LtWorf wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Canonical has always been happy to ship software that they know fully well shouldn't be shipped doesn't fill me with hope that it will even work decently without causing massive issues to everyone (remember when they started to use pulseaudio? In the end it was such a mess that the solution was to abandon it).

It was rough for a while, but my debian machine still runs pulseaudio and it works pretty well. I agree that ubuntu doesn't do enough testing before releasing stuff, but I am grateful that so many people are willing to grind themselves against the bugs before they hit more conservative distributions

It's deprecated. I think most people moved on to pipewire.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#282

Post by SkiFire13 »

pizlonator wrote: post #66
SkiFire13 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ is still changing quite a lot though, just not in ways that fix the existing issues (often because doing so would break ABI stability).

That is a reason why a lot of folks stick with C. In some sense, the chasm I'm describing hasn't been crossed by C++ yet

I'm not sure I'm following, are you claiming that C++ is still not widely used enough? That doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#283

Post by bayindirh »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #278
bayindirh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People seem to forget Linux is only a kernel. I certainly don't and that's why I'm advocating the userspace shall stay GPL. The freedom has two pillars. Kernel and userspace. If you mow one of the two down, you lose everything.

There's nothing about using permissive licenses that reduces freedom. Even if someone makes a closed fork of some software down the line, the original will always be there and will still be just as free. Comparing permissive licensing to a loss of freedom is not a valid comparison.

> Even if someone makes a closed fork of some software down the line, the original will always be there and will still be just as free.

Like MinIO, Solaris, Elasticsearch, Hashicorp Suite and countless others. The versions before the license changes are healthy as a doornail. You're absolutely right.

Some of them are re-forked, some did not.

Also, sometimes that closed fork is the only viable option, making the hardware it's running on an expensive doornail. I also don't like that.

I remember using SDKs and software forked from open ones with version numbers like "1.8.7-really1.9.0-internal-thishardwareonly-special-3.2.5-unlocked" which only runs on a distro from 2006 when it's full moon on 29th of February, and the sum of digits of the date is divisible by 7 and 11 at the same time.

Can you patch this? I guess you can, but where's the source? I bet somebody deleted it by accident and it's not present anymore.

Permissive licenses don't take away the four freedoms, but add a fifth one. The ability to take the other four away. Without prior notice. This is what I don't like personally.

In short, I don't like doornails which are not actual doornails. Permissive licenses enable that freedom.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#284

Post by bayindirh »

LtWorf wrote: post #281
bigfishrunning wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was rough for a while, but my debian machine still runs pulseaudio and it works pretty well. I agree that ubuntu doesn't do enough testing before releasing stuff, but I am grateful that so many people are willing to grind themselves against the bugs before they hit more conservative distributions

It's deprecated. I think most people moved on to pipewire.

Debian migrated everyone to Pipewire a while ago without people noticing it, as they intended.

Pipewire is working great.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#285

Post by lelanthran »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #277
lelanthran wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: That's not important. What I want to see is the Rewrite-it-in-Rust movement move towards GPL. GPL is pro-user. MIT is pro-business. In their zeal to convert, they are happily replacing pro-user software with pro-business software. Their primary goal is to convert, not to safeguard. If they shifted their goal from spreading Rust to protecting users, I'd be a lot happier abo…

There is absolutely nothing "pro-business" about permissive licenses. People choose permissive licenses for all kinds of reasons. For example, I personally use them because I believe they are more free and thus more in line with my values. You shouldn't project unsubstantiated statements onto people's motives like this.

> You shouldn't project unsubstantiated statements onto people's motives like this.

I am not criticising their motives, I am criticising the result!

Also, definitions are hard. It's why we have pro-choice/pro-life and not anti-choice/anti-life - using the positive spin is a good faith characterisation of a position.

In much the same way, I am using pro-user/pro-business; if my intention was to vilify one of those positions I would have used pro-user/anti-user or pro-business/anti-business to label those positions.

No reasonable interpretation of pro-user/pro-business can make the audience think that I am unfairly characterising either of two positions.

I say this to address the use of the word "unsubstantiated" in your assertion about my characterisations.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#286

Post by imtringued »

b112 wrote: post #164
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

Ubuntu oozes over debian like a parasitic malaise of vile chicanery. Their entire goal is to, essentially, use the work of untold millions, provided for free, to build their own cathedral. People complain about AWS and others taking OSS projects and profiting wildly off them, but they're all children compared to the machinations of Ubuntu. It's been this way from the start. The constant conflict of interest, where Ub…

I could have gotten behind the first three paragraphs until you started mentioning systemd. After that everything you've written sounds like the rambling of a crazy person.

systemd won the init system wars because it is pretty damn good from a technical perspective. The competition didn't even try to participate.

>Barely functional, broken in inane ways, and leaving any professional in a situation of endless masking of a myriad of barely cogent and horribly malign services.

Everything you're complaining about was even more true of previous init systems and barely true for systemd at all.

Meanwhile Ubuntu is a garbage fire from a technical perspective. Snaps are garbage and forced down your throat.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#287

Post by pjmlp »

superkuh wrote: post #229
bigfishrunning wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

further down that thread https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html ``` Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv). ``` It seems to me that the APT change was just a nail in the coffin of these older architectures, which would have eventually been sunset anyway, due to sqv not being available. If yo…

Yep. And nothing you've linked or pointed out changes the claim I made: that re: rust, Canonical employees are making the decisions, not Debian.

The thing with open source, and many industry standards like ISO and ECMA, is that who shows up gets to call the shots.

So when it isn't going into the right direction that we care, maybe more people with other mindset should join.

It is like complaining about who wins elections without bothering to cast a valid vote.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#288

Post by pjmlp »

duskdozer wrote: post #247
IshKebab wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Can we stop this conspiracy nonsense? They have explicitly stated that licensing was not a motivation, and even if you think they're lying it wouldn't make any sense anyway! No Tivoization is foiled by Coreutils being GPL. That's ridiculous for so many reasons, not least you can j…

Well, why not license it as GPL then? If they don't care of course.

Because GPL doesn't play well with static linking, the new favourite of programming languages rediscovering the pre-1990's ways of most operating systems linkers (aka binders).

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#289

Post by pjmlp »

PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #174
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

To be fair, no one should be using Ubuntu. They are the free CD people from the 2000s. They are the Apple of Linux, marketing wins, but low quality. They used outdated linux (Debian-family) because its lower cost to maintain. All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch)

Once upon a time Mandrake was great for consumer hardware, alongside SuSE, both kind of ignored nowadays, then came Ubuntu, which no one apparently should be using.

So we're kind of left out of options, because there is hardly another distro on Distrowatch that has a similar success rate being installed on random laptops that normies want to try GNU/Linux on.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#290

Post by pjmlp »

jabl wrote: post #142
staticassertion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, well yeah, statically linked binaries have that downside. I guess I don't think that's a big deal, but I could maybe imagine on some devices that are heavily constrained that it could be? IDK. Compression is insanely effective.

If Rust and static linking were to become much more popular, Linux distros could adopt some rsync/zsync like binary diff protocol for updates instead of pulling entire packages from scratch.

Static linking used to be popular, as it was the only way of linking in most computer systems, outside expensive hardware like Xerox workstations, Lisp machines, ETHZ, or what have you.

One of the very first consumer hardware to support dynamic linking was the Amiga, with its Libraries and DataTypes.

We moved away from having a full blown OS done with static linking, with exception of embedded deployments and firmware, for many reasons.

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