My scepticism is that this should’ve been done within the coreutils project, or at least very closely affiliated. This isn’t an area of the linux technical stack that we should tolerate being made distro-specific, especially when the licensing is controlled by a single organisation that famously picks and chooses its interpretation of “FOSS” to suit its profit margins.

On a purely technical level, GNU coreutils should very seriously consider moving to rust if only to counter alternatives before it’s too late. While these utilities work well in C (and usually stay secure thanks to the Unix philosophy limiting the project scope), FOSS projects are continuing to struggle with finding new contributors as younger devs are more likely to use modern systems languages like Go and Rust. Not to mention that any project using Rust as a marketing tool will appeal to anyone rightfully concerned about hardening their system.

fedora has been this for myself. maybe tweaking every now and then to fix whatever edge cases I’ve run into but it’s the least painful distro I’ve used so far

Not quite the same but you might like the Linux from Nothing series, building out a Linux install from first principles.

Obviously lots of linux youtubers have done videos on linux from scratch too but the step by step nature is pretty enjoyable to watch.

Do they not provide an md5sum? I’ve never seen anyone check an app’s integrity issuing public keys

Hector and others were really bad losses for the Rust kernel devs but Lina? That’s catastrophic. She was a figurehead in getting apple silicon working so well on Linux that even Linus moved his development machine to an M1 Macbook.

Linus has royally fucked it with how long he sat on the side of this. Im so sorry to Lina and others who have been burned by this community.