Cargo & curl | sh

I got a new professional laptop shipped with Ubuntu 24.04.

10 years ago I would have used tons of Debian packages to install the software I need and like to use. Nowadays it’s only for a few enterprise software (browser, messaging, password management). Snap also got its little share.

The big part went to Cargo (the Rust package manager), and the infamous curl | sh which has become the most popular installation method these days. It’s always a bit scary to use it, until you remember it’s not worse than installing random packages from PyPI, npm, or cargo. Anyway, always think about where the executable code you run comes from.

Using curl | sh, I got most of my development stack:

• uv
• Rust
• nvm
• Docker
• Claude Code
• Zed
• Atuin

And using cargo install most of the utilities I like to use:

• rg
• gitui
• just
• bat
• eza
• fd-find

Compiling these Rust crates feels like the good old Gentoo way of installing things.

The only non-Rust tool I compiled from source was Neovim.