Disclaimer: I pretty much don't like Rust, but most criticism of it boils down to culture war.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Why would a programming language destroy an operating system?
If your tinfoil is thick enough, no coherent thought can penetrate.
I think this is about how apt will depend on rust and then debian will need to drop some architetures it supports
No, no, the architectures! The Debian architecture (apparently)!
Processor architectures maybe. They put Rust into Debian and it's so bad that now e.g. amd64 is ruined forever for any OS and won't see any new processors in the future. We'll have to move to a different architecture. I didn't watch the video since I treasure my brain cells too much but that's what I choose to read into it.
(A more reasonable reading is that Debian now ships a kernel that includes Rust code and coincidentally has also dropped builds for several obscure architectures but I do not feel obliged to assume reason with a title and thumbnail like that.)
Badly chosen title and thumbnail aside. It's actually the 2nd reason. With Rust now part of the kernel, the kernel won't build for a number of architectures. Whether the architectures are obscure or not is debatable. I sure wouldn't want to debate one who still uses them though. Either way, the fact that the kernel won't be compiled for these architectures is true.
So it's not "Rust destroys Debian", it's "Rust destroys Linux"?
It's 70-80% culture war bullshit, the rest is actual complaints for the language (or at least the use of language) often bundled with culture war bullshit.
Partly it's more of "destroy an ecosystem". Among languages, Rust is at the frontlines of a continuing trend to remove GPL-licensed, community toolkits and put corporate-friendly, AI-friendly toolkits in their place, eg.: replacing
grepwithopenaigrep, which would basically be step 2 in the process of privatizing or corporatizing the Linux ecosystem (and leads to the loss of a number of user freedoms).Hopefully nobody tells the corpos that they can just use BSD if they want a MIT licensed kernel and user-land
Licenses don't matter when corpos don't care anyways. Especially for training LLMs. They don't care about copyright. I choose to use tools based on there merits over simply going "it has my favorite license." Even though I say that, I still prefer AGPL even though I understand that of the corpos want to steal, they'll steal it.
That's true, for now.
Licenses might not matter now but if enough of a communal current for respect of licenses and of punishment for license breaking ramps up, we might be able to see something like (L)GPL class action suits against large corporations, at which point it becomes possible to at least seek reparation for previous damages.
But as with anything and everything law-related, licenses are declarations of intent. Their validity is only substantiated by the holder's capacity to pursue punishment.