Zig is "c", but modern and safe.

Zig is safer than C, but not on a level that is comparable to Rust, so it lacks its biggest selling point. Unfortunately just being a more modern language is not enough to sell it.

So imagine if trying to fit in a C-like cousin failed

C++ was not added to Linux because Linus Torvalds thought it was an horrible language, not because it was not possible to integrate in the kernel.

But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn't even find where the code to do a thing was.

IMO that tells more about how the project was organized and names things than the language used.

So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

As the other commenter pointed out, there's Redox. The issue is that this completly disregards an incremental approach: you have to rewrite everything before it comes usable, you can't do it piece by piece. Currently the approach of Rust for Linux is not even to rewrite things, but to allow writing new drivers in Rust.

Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don't want to learn a new language in order to help isn't going to make many friends on that team.

Have you seen the conference video? That's not just refusal to learn a new language, it's open hostility. And it's not the only instance, for example Asahi Lina also reported unreasonable behaviour by some maintainers just because she wrote Rust code, even when Rust was not involved.

Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front

Forget competing, they lack even the basics.

Where's the punch?

In the face of everyone expecting an upgrade

To be fair trees still use energy for doing this, but that energy is conveniently provided by the sun.

Because Rust is not the only language that made this faulty assumption. It is an issue that affects Rust's stdlib, just like it is an issue that affects Python's stdlib and other libraries. In fact this was first reported as a vulnerability to yt-dlp (where it was actually exploitable) and then discovered it applied to many other libraries (where the exploitability is highly dependent on how the feature is used).

Rust here is only used as clickbait because of its aim to be "safe", but its position is no different from other languages.

If you read the article from the researcher that discovered the vulnerability you'll see they never call out Rust in particular, only as part of a list of languages that are affected. https://flatt.tech/research/posts/batbadbut-you-cant-securely-execute-commands-on-windows/

More like Windows showing ads even when you boot Linux

Citra is a 3DS emulator, this is a DS one, how are you comparing them?

Even after reading the key points it wasn't clear "how" they manage to do that. The article is not much more detailed, but at least mentions them exploiting android's accessibility services.

I did that a couple of times, but it was more like "I don't want to grind all of this stuff, I want to skip to the fun part". Also, it's morally different because it impacts nobody else.

Hey, I switched to Firefox because I liked its UI better (after Quantum though)

If you live in the USA you don't suffer from the problem it solves because you have ~5 IP v4 addresses per capita (totaling to 41% of all the IP v4 addresses), and likewise many european countries have ~2 per capita (although there are expeptions like Italy and Spain which are a bit under 1 per capita). However many other countries don't have such luxury, for example in india there's one for every 36 people, which is obviously not enough and thus they have to either use NAT everywhere or switch to IPv6.