been wanting to dive into Rust embedded for a while.
Unfortunately It will be a while until I can get some proper hardware like what is in the rust-embedded book, so until then I am using my 8 bit arduino nano clone that I already have
Both seem to be popular, which one would you suggest to a beginner? which would have least bugs, more support, etc? and/or is there other alternatives you'd reccomend?
avr-hal is an embedded-hal implementation. embedded-hal is a hardware abstraction layer being developed by Rust's embedded devices working group. It is useful if you are familiar with embedded-hal, but you probably aren't.
This does not directly answer your question, but because you mentioned being a beginner I thought I write something on that respect.
I do not know what your background is, but from my personal experience as a seasoned embedded C programmer I would recommend:
Learn Rust first (i.e. read the book), make sure you understand the ownership rules
Dive into embedded Rust using QEmu (hardware emulator in the embedded Rust book). Ownership rules make it handling peripherals not very intuitive at first (if you are used to C's everything-goes approach).
Once you feel comfortable with how things work in embedded Rust, you can have fun with real hardware