On Debian, Rust, and the Unix Spirit

An article by Giorgio Rutigliano crossed my feed this week - Debian e Rust - written in Italian, thoughtful and well-argued, describing how Debian is embracing Rust more deeply in its toolchain and base system. You can read it here. Even if you don’t read Italian, the message comes through: from my understanding, Debian wants to bring Rust from the edges to the heart.

I’m not against Rust. It’s elegant, memory-safe, a serious contribution to the future of systems programming. I even like Nushell very much for data processing, it’s one of the best Rust-based tools I’ve come across. But I find myself uneasy, not with the language, but with the momentum, the feeling that yet again we’re folding more and more into the same few projects, until individuality and composability blur into a single stack.

It feels like déjà vu.

Years ago I lived through the same shift with systemd. I understood the rationale: unifying service management, making configuration consistent across distributions. But over time it grew beyond its first purpose, quietly absorbing pieces of the OS until it became less a component and more an environment of its own. In those years I moved from RHEL and Ubuntu to Debian, not for fashion, but for freedom. I wanted fewer vendor fingerprints, a place where things were still close to upstream, where the design decisions still felt transparent.

That migration taught me something about myself. I wasn’t chasing the newest. I was searching for alignment. Predictability, independence, small coherent parts.

That search eventually led me to FreeBSD. Not as a grand gesture, but as a return to sanity. Its design choices spoke to my core values: deliberate engineering, clear documentation, the trust that when I upgrade, nothing fundamental will break beneath me. For my servers, FreeBSD became home. Debian remained a backup option, still part of my toolkit, but the emotional center had moved.

Now, reading about Debian’s deepening embrace of Rust, I feel the same tug I once felt with systemd: progress, yes, but also the quiet erasure of simplicity. One more layer of abstraction, one more compiler in the base, one more dependency hidden in the promise of safety.

In my PursePC project, that little experiment in living lightly with technology, I hit limits with FreeBSD and turned to Alpine Linux. Musl, OpenRC, small binaries, clear intent. A different philosophy, closer in spirit to the Unix that first made sense to me. Sometimes, less really is more.

I’m open to new things. I use Linux Mint on my desktop for convenience, and I admire what Rust developers are achieving. But part of me also finds quiet reassurance in systems like IBM i: proprietary, yes, but remarkably stable and internally coherent. There’s a beauty in platforms that know what they are and don’t try to become everything at once.

The good news? We still have choices. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenIndiana, Alpine Linux, and others that refuse to be absorbed. Each one a reminder that open source was never meant to be monoculture; it was meant to be ecosystem.

Modern doesn’t always mean new. Sometimes it simply means right.

🌷💜