2023: Linux rusting away into non-FOSS territory – Build rnote and you will see

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Linux 6.2-rc2 kernel is out as the last commit in kernel.org at the start of the 2023 year.  RUST is here, the initial code-base is included in the kernel.  At least Arch seems to be disabling it for now, at the beta level at least, we shall see.

Rust is not just a language, as people commonly think, it is much more.  It is a building environment, system, and a mode change of the philosophy of building packages from source.   Rust incorporates its own git system in pulling code in from 2nd and 3rd parties.  So if you have never gotten into the real FOSS practice of auditing code before you build, try and audit this stuff.  If building in C you thought was a practice similar to building sand castles, by comparison, this is like building sand castles with quick-sand ON QUICK SAND.

Rnote is a crappy little gui similar to the old MS paintbrush, like a childrens’ sketching pad.  No, it is worse, it doesn’t even save in popular image formats but only its own.  Autosave is on.  You get the picture?  This is gtk4 only “crap”!  Not only that, you can’t find a configuration file for it anywhere in your user’s home, and for preferences to be changed and be saved, dbus should be running.  Why does a kids’ sketching pad program need dbus to save its own preferences/choices/settings?

But this crappy little gui is built with rust.  Before you start building you may have no clue what dependencies it is going to need, or the initial building source provides little clues of configurations for the build and where is it pulling code from.  ONE of the sources is Google, among other favorite FOSS contributors that happen to be multinational conglomerates out to make trillions for shareholders.  We are talking about many GBs of endless source being pulled in.  Rust stores this code in cargo, like trashcans of it full of crap.  How do I know if I restart the process 2′ later the source of the dependencies hasn’t changed?  Aahhh… some excited RUST-fan will point out you can save those tons of trash code into those tin-cans..  so you can assure “reproducibility”.   If for a tiny little gui we have 80GB of 3rd party code that needs to be stored for reproducibility, imagine what your building machine will look like for a minimal distro full of rust packages.

Linus et.al may find all this “new” technology interesting and modernizing the software building industry.  What rust is doing to linux and foss in general is to be corroding its very essence.  It has become very hypocritical to be speaking of FOSS when source code has become so damn impossible to review and audit.  Large multinational corporations may employ Terra-Flops and PetaBytes of resources of automated machines that just screen code for potential risks.  The rest of us will just have to trust the heart bleeding donators and contributors of open/free code.

What else is this new fashion doing to FOSS other rusting it, corroding it?  It re-emphasizes the hegemony of N.American and W.European control on software.  How?  Not everyone has access to fibre-optic speeds and bandwidth to be pulling 80GB of code just to build a sketching pad software, or hack it, fork it, and improve on it.  What is common and a cheap resource for N.Americans and W.Europeans is an unachievable dream that would cost many salaries in other parts of the world.  So this is not only “rust”, it is a form of racism for coding.  Some enjoy the luxury of abusing those resources of bandwidth and reliable storage, some just can’t.  But Linus and many others who influence and “control” the evolution of Linux, don’t care.  It is not their problem.  Ofcourse not, people who make 6figures $/Eu net, working 20-30hr/wk, spending half their year traveling and staying in 6star hotels giving presentations and lectures, can’t possibly be bothered with humanity’s problems.  But they are the gods of FOSS, they are not the “pope”, who does care … right!  No left!

Am I being extreme again.  Go build your copy of rnote and see if you like it, and wonder what Linux will be like 10 years from now, if not a proprietary OS sold cheap by an anti-MS consortium (Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, HP, facebook. …etc).

 

YES, Linus Torvalds has approved of the incorporation of Rust INTO the kernel, and by who knows when Rust will replace C.  You will boot up your minimal system and start your rust shell and if you type a command that doesn’t exist in the system, your Rust-Engine will fetch it, build it, and provide it by the time enter key has been released.  Yeah right!   But there are plenty of linux users out there still running 32bit hardware, worried about the dicontinuation of support for 32bit.

Mind boggling bullshit coming from major corporations trying to control, alter, corrode, FOSS, using propaganda from their corporate rugs about all those good new developments (ZFS, ZSTD, IPv6, Rust, Qt,…).   And those in position to critically look at what is being “pushed” by paid propaganda, FOSS marketing that is, are opening their arms to enrich the FOSS environment with anything new and exciting.  We are all one big happy family here, all we bus-riding to 70hr/wk jobs, and Bugatti drivers as well.  Am I being sarcastic?   It is better than cursing straight out all those “FOSS godfathers and mothers”.  Not their fault.  It is the dummies who act as misguided consumers that piss me off!

 

PS   Remember the #1 excuse distro managers used to defend their sudden choice of zstd (facebook’s 1st attempt into contributing “free” code) was that single core compression wasn’t producing the same checksums as multicore.  Not true anymore.  XZ just simply produces the same checksums whether compressing with a single core/thread or 128 of them, yet it is fast, and compresses much better than zstd.  Now see whether you can have a modern distro without zstd in it, especially gnu-linux distro.

 

PS2  Brainwashing (aka conditioning) has the vast majority of the human population believe that technology and science is always “producing” new things and new things MUST always replace OLD things, no matter why and how those new things were created to “replace”.  My 60s car can still run and be rebuild easily long after I will be gone.   I can assure you that 20 years from now you will not find a single operational 20year old car, especially an electric or hybrid car.  I hope you catch my drift, and I am not getting too old to be making sense to younger people.  No it is not an antique, it is just a cheap old car kept indoors for half itslife in a dry climate I bout some years back for 3weeks worth of pay.

PS3  If you are young, and thinking about a coding career, C may have become too popular and too many people know it well, so you may not become rich working as a C programmer.  But RUST!!!  Now that is the new buzz-word, the new hot ticket to richdom, just like the millions of Java programmers thought will all become rich by 2020.  Trust me!   NOT!!!  I have a hunch that C will still be around, backwards compatible, all the way to the last day that humanity will vanish.  In the eve of biodiversity collapse we are still dreaming of becoming rich and buying electric supercars.  I have no sympathy for us!

Your favorite anti-social critical of everything and everyone anonymous friend.

 

44 thoughts on “2023: Linux rusting away into non-FOSS territory – Build rnote and you will see”

    • It doesn’t matter, not much does these days, it only matters when you have corporate resources to make adequate noise so the sheep think “this is where it is at”. When you open up rust.org website it stinks corporate finesse and marketing; that is to make something appear as something other than what it really is. What is rust without the money? NOTHING. Where is the money for producing and advancing rust as it is Linus greatest gift to coder-kind? From Rust Foundation. Hmmm… who is the rust foundation? It is a $230us Delaware corporation or LLC. A clerical worker at MS or Linux Foundation itself, can be the single entity registered in this corporation. Who has the stock? The person that has the bag with a stack of the majority. Remember, RH, was a small such corporation once. When its mission became successful and the circle had come to an end (dominance in 80% of linux distros and common software) the true face of the owner appeared as a “buyer”. Those lower manhattan boyz have gotten much smarter that they once were.

      If the language was presented as one created by mega-corporation X, with trizilion budget on its back, people would have been skeptical in adopting it. If it is marketed as something that came from “people like us”, and every corporate linux rag on the net is talking about this dog with fleas as the great new thing that will replace everything from the past, people fall for it.

      Not everybody. Some of the most gifted C programmers out there are laughing really hard at the monstrosity called rust. They are scratching their head listening to all this bubble talk and are waiting for the bubble to burst on its own.

      Why does it feel like Déjà vu? Because corporations were able to measure the damage done by FOSS to their business and devised a way to gain back the piece of the pie. It materializes with various faces and names.

      But sheep remain static, look amazed, bend over eat some grass, then yell “mehahhhhh… meeaahhh…”.

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      • This is a dark picture of the situation. But i prefer solutions over just looking this dramatic state. Perhaps a link to a tutorial which explain how to compile linux kernel without Rust or npm.

        I can’t found one in my favorite search engine.

        I know this is not a real solution because linux kernel will be more and more rusted with time but this is a footstep.

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        • I share your demand for solutions rather than just public contempt of the popular choices. As anticapitalist (chief dev of antiX and yianiris (team member of joborun) have mentioned, the kernel’s own flag that would leave rust totally out of the kernel don’t seem effective enough. Although as far as I can tell and from what it has been published it is not relating to any kernel function, YET!!

          in git.disroot.org/joborun-pkg/jobcomm/linux{6.0,6.1,6.2}/config incorporate the same flag

          CONFIG_HAVE_RUST=m
# Rust hacking
#
# end of Rust hacking

          The end of the config file by Arch at least (I imagine a modification of a default template) indicates an upcoming section of more valid choices about rust in the kernel.

          The deeper concerns are about many other packages now exclusively built with rust and whether they can be avoided? Can we build mesa without rust? Can we live without mesa?

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          • Thank you! This is a significant footstep for me.

            This is probably ridiculous but i’m a little bit sad and at the same time very happy of this pile of bloated softwares (rust, systemd, npm, glibc, dbus, etc).

            Why? Because it’s like Linux in 2004 when i started to use a distro. You musted compile your drivers, write your own config files for ALSA or OSS, lots of things did not worked work and that was good, because i learnt.

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  2. What a strange post. You downloaded a bloated piece of software, irrationally blamed that bloat on the programming language the software is written in, and then went on a non-sequitur ramble about corporations as if any of them forced you to use that bloated piece of software. Although I don’t worry much about labels I do situate myself as an opponent of capitalist hegemony and even from that sympathetic stance I want to let you know that reading this article really did the opposite of convince me to agree with anything you have to say about software. If you’re serious about what you believe you can surely do better than this.

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    • ” I do situate myself as an opponent of capitalist hegemony”

      So what does this mean? In case anyone asks you you respond as an opponent of capitalist hegemony? How would this differentiate you from those who are actually struggling against capitalism?

      Nobody forced me to use any software ever, but even if I don’t use something I can still voice my concern and criticism of it. I am not forced to buy an electric vehicle either, but I can have an opinion about what is around, can’t I?

      It is not the programming language I find problematic, it is the entire setup of building and installing software that has me concerned. GO is not that different either. Flatpak is of concern as well. If all goes this way we will soon have no linux dstributions, all we will have is a kernel and rust. It is the same pervesive intrusion systemd displayed, and maybe this is much much worse.

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      • I’m sorry but your “I’m the real anticapitalist and you’re doing nothing!” response is the funniest projection of a reaction to a stranger’s sentiments that I don’t really feel I need to read or respond any further. If you’re as serious as you suppose here, your writing style and complete lack of factual accuracy sure as hell makes you out to be more of a joke than anything.

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        • OK you may be a rust coder who took this criticism personally, and you may have invested a couple of years of your life into learning rust so you can be ahead of your game, eating the hype up bait, hook, like, and sinker.

          Since you insist on being serious, re-read please your own comments. They contain ZERO rational argument or objective criticism, they are 100% characterizations of someone believing that this will make in impact somewhere.
          “funniest projection” “more of a joke than anything” …

          Get yourself together and provide an argument we can discuss and spare us your cry-baby characterizations. I have built several rust based packages and seen that they have total disregard for within distribution/building environment dependencies, pull commonly found libraries from alternative sources as cargo does, build based on those dependencies and carry their parts as part of the package. And this in an unclear way on whether those dependency sources are fixed editions or rolling developing code. For decades people criticized MS for doing this, apart for the non-open non-free code they package, obviously copying things from FOSS, making a 5GB system into a 50GB system.

          This practice is also bandwidth intensive. If ten different pieces of software are using ten different glibc or musl forks loading in the build, and say on average it takes two runs to built each, you have downloaded these huge libraries 20 times, when in the old days they just stood still in your building environment. Ok, you can maintain the cargo deposit without much feedback of required space, and you may not have to download the same thing twice but it is checked if it is the right version/edition, so it is not 20 times, it is now 10.

          Let’s say you are building into a docker container, each run of a package is done on a clean new container, where is your cargo collection? It doesn’t matter to you, you have Terrabyte/nano-second fiberoptic connection and you are right in the middle of the central backbone of the mid-atlantic coastal network. Things transport to you and from you faster than an M2 SSD. You don’t care. What does this mean, that someone living in Sandwich islands or Solomon islands can’t participate in FOSS anymore because it takes 2 days of downloads to build “mesa”?

          Who is really hyping up rust? Who is paying for the promotion? Open up your eyes, they are making videos to assist kernel coders on using rust in the near future and abandon the “antiquated” write and compile in plain Jane C. Why don’t we see some similar promotion and hype about s6. It doesn’t take too much of a genius to realize it is BY FAR the most advanced and efficient init and service supervision software.

          Does it matter whether it is good or bad? When I see such a hyped drive by huge multinationals, propelling something to the front line, there is something really really fishy behind the motive.
          That is critical thought and anti-capitalism. There can NEVER be anything good FOR HUMANITY coming from the interests of LARGE CAPITAL. Nothing, Ever. There can only be destruction, pollution, dependence, and monopoly constructing coming out of capital. It is not anti-human, it is anti-life. Extinction is directly driven by CAPITAL!!

          And IDIOTS are falling right into the trap due to automation, laziness, and eye-candy.
          FOSS is not really FOSS anymore because those squishy bouncy icon desktops are too addictive for people to give up.

          I have a dear friend, frequenting this board, I love him too much to tell him directly to fuck off, and is asking how to get usb sticks automounted into the file-manager. What should I say?

          This is why we are loosing foss, it is going away, it is in the hands of the financial world to decide its development and demise. Sway is buggy as hell still, after all this hoopla, and there are tons of eye candy developing on top of it to be ready for the “next day”.

          Am I serious? I don’t get paid to be, I am who I am and how I am, no funding gained or lost due to my behavior. I am not selling anything, and I don’t make dividends selling anything. I don’t even like the arrogance of the s6 writer, but I take my hat off for the code published. If IBM gave away systemd free and you had to buy an s6 license for $100, I’d still recommend it is worth your while.

          Why don’t you ask Bercot whether he considers rewriting s6 in rust if he was handed $100K by google to add their name in the code. Why don’t you ask Linus Torv. why out off all the servers he has available, and he can afford one more with change found on his car carpet, why would his personal kernel git is housed by google. What does that really mean? git.google…/torvalds/linux/6.3…

          Now imagine when your ~/.cargo will be a google cloud disk mount.

          Nightmare? No, “development”!

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  3. Are there any distros that are as focused on de-rusting the kernel as there are systemmd free distros? I have multiple reasons across a very broad span of categories for not running anything that requires rust to build, or was built with rust, and I hold Mozilla in a great deal of contempt for their actions against the FOSS community.

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    • They don’t need to de-rust anything, they just have to set CONFIG_RUST=n in their .config (or just not set it =y) when they build the kernel. Gentoo allows you to do exactly that and systemd or no systemd is entirely your choice.

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    • As far as I know the only rust capability the kernel has is to be able to bring up the library of rust if available to be used for code calling on it, it doesn’t really have rust code in it. And this is 6.0+ 5.xx didn’t have any rust configuration. 5.4 5.10 5.15 are the current active lts kernels and none have a rust function in them.

      linux6.7/config:# Rust hacking
      linux6.7/config:# CONFIG_HAVE_RUST=n
      linux6.7/config:# end of Rust hacking

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