If you're an emacs user comfortable with other CLI compilers, you'd be absolutely fine starting with your preferred package manager's "install rust" command and working from there for the bottom-up approach, assuming your distro packages the standard installer. Using this gives you rustc+cargo, which is the equivalent of node+npm, go+subcommands, etc. If that's not available, rustup is fine too!
Indeed, I'm definitely a bottom-up guy these days. Many thanks for the tips.
I'm using archlinux, I think it carries a good rust package.
João