It seems like a fundamental part of linux has been under the spotlight recently in a non favourable way. I’m referring specifically to the “sudo vs sudo-rs” controversy.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to dig more into all of this, so I’d like to hear some informed opinion on the matter.
Well, for basic user this is a thing that doesn’t affect on daily use. However, if you are server maintainer, then you should probably pay attention that everything works as it should, because some features have changed.
On my opinion, this is one fo those “controversies” that are not needed and are more or less instigated by people, who do not like the change. And if you like, you can always move back to old sudo.
And I think part of the fact is that because it was adopted by Canonical for Ubuntu, it automatically means that it sucks for some people on Linux community.
I’m not actually current on well…current thoughts about the choice, though I understand the traditional mindset vs the ‘rust’ mindset. But anyway, I thought i’d babble a minute.
My personal musing is that sudo is a very old framework and probably deserved to be revisited, because heck I contributed to it before the turn of the millennium even. Though there’s the other thing that fits the Unix model, it does one thing…and I think it did it pretty well in the day.
I try not to be biased against any linux distribution in particular (I’ve tried most of them, starting in 1996), but my coding knowledge is insufficient to argue in favor or against this choice. It would be nice if any veteran coder could share a technical point of view for either side of the scenery.
I haven’t been following that drama but I have been using run0 for the last year or so.
What is the “sudo vs sudo-rs” controversy?
That’s what I’d like to know as well. I am running in Linux circles, HackerNews, Reddit, you name it, and I did not step onto that landmine yet.
And while it probably will not affect me in my private Linux life, I am using Linux professionally as well, so I’d like to keep up to date with changes.
When it was announced that it’s going to be adopted in Ubuntu 25.10 some people started this traditional “if it works, don’t fix it” -mantra. And as you can guess, because it was adopted first by Ubuntu, now it’s something like spyware or something like that.
Also another issue for some seems to be that it was written in Rust and not in C, even though this addresses memory safety issues.
So in the end this is not actually controversy, simply small battle in the great Distro Wars, that seems to be luckily fought mostly in the shadows and unbeknownst to most of us.
Oh cool, so should we shift to sudo-rs too and uninstall sudo? We can have a syslink of sudo pointing to sudo-rs.
That is totally a matter of opinion right now (at least that’s my opinion on the matter).
what controversy? sudo-rs is garbage, not ready, and rocking the boat unnecessarily.
sudo is battle tested, works great, there are 0 reasons to replace it.
There is no discussion to be had. You do not want some alpha garbage to replace a system critical component, you’d have to be a complete moron to even consider it., if you’re curious you can try it, see if it works, but it’s not like there are gonna be fireworks, it’ll just work, until something inevitably goes wrong, because it needs more thorough testing.
Also idk what this controversy you refer to even could be? (canonical breaking ubuntu by switching to rust coreutils maybe? lmao)
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Sudo-rs is a rust-reimplementation of Sudo with some minor changes to defaults.
Because of rust it’s pretty much a systemd-tier hornets nest.
Thanks! Interesting.
I did some more searches, came across this article, which seems reasonably readable as well:
Is this about the choice of sudo-rs to display the password as masked instead of hiding it completely? That’s a change of expected behavior that I’m not a fan of.
This was actually page I also stumbled while looking this up. Was going to put it up here but forgot. 
This is article sums up things really simple way that I like.
I have been current using Ubuntu 25.10 and it doesn’t show password masked but hides it completely. 
If you are referring to inputting password on sudo prompt that is.
It is more about “change is bad” combined with the ever present rust vs non-rust debate.
Throughout my life I’ve always found there is a discussion to be had, about well, everything.
We learn more this way.
Shouting down a discussion just because we disagree with the topic or the outcome, or a product or whatever will only hold us back.
Right, wrong, indifferent, pile of crap, it doesn’t matter, interaction and the sharing of opinions is where it’s at. If we lose that we have failed.