Canonical is making a major change to Ubuntu, star𓃲ting with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10, replacing GNU Coreutils with the🎃 Rust-based uutils.

Coreutils has comprised a core component of most Linux distributions since the beginning, providing many of the most common command-line utilities, including chmod, dir, install, ls, cp, mkdir, mv, and more. Canonical’s Jon Seager in March the company’s intention to replace Coreutils with uutils.

In recent years, there has been an effort to reimplement this suite of tools in Rust, with the goal of reachi꧟ng 100% compatibility with the existing tools. Similar projects, like sudo-rs, aim to replace key security-critical utilities wit🍨h more modern, memory-safe alternatives.

Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goa🦩l is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.

Seager goes on to address the reason for the change, saying it is being driven by “the enhanced resilience and safety” that Rust-based utilities provide, not by an increase in performance, as is often the case with Rust transitions.

Performance is a frequently cited rationale for “Rewrite it in Rust” projects. While performance is high on my list of priorities, it’s not the primary driver behind this change. These utilities are at the heart of the distribution – and it’s the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me.

The Rust language, its type system and its borrow checker (and its community!) work together to encourage developers to write safe, sound, resilient software. With added safety comes an increase in security guarantees, and with an increase in security comes an increase in overall resilience of the system – and where better to start than with the foundational tools that build the distribution?

Controversy and Praise for the Decision

Needless to say, Canonical’s decision has been met with a fair amount of controversy. while the decision to migrate to Rust-based uutils is not particularly controversial, some have taken issue with the move from GPL to an MIT license.

Still others are concerned about the move away from GNU Coreutils from the standpoint of breaking with tradition. Linux is often referred to as GNU/Linux because of the important role Coreutils plays in the operating system. Moving to uutils effectively removes the “GNU” from GNU/Linux.

Despite the controve🐭rsy, Canonical is winning praise from some sources. The 𒊎, a nonprofit involved in developing open standards, and the benefits uutils will bring to Ubuntu.

The decision to adopt sudo-rs is in line with Canonical’s commitment to Carefully But Purposefully increase 🃏the resilience of critical system software, by adopting Rust. Rust is a programming language with strong memory safety guarantees that eliminates many of the vulnerabilities that have historically plagued traditional C-based software.

Canoni🐻cal is sponsoring this milestone to make sudo-rs an even better implementation of the sudo command. With the above features, more users and system administrators should be able to use sudo-rs without an🐭y change to their current workflows.

The maintainers of sudo-rs are sticking to the “less is more” approach: some features of the original sudo will not be implemented in sudo-rs if they serve only highly niche use cases. The maintainers continue their collaboration with Todd Miller, the incumbent sudo maintainer for over thirty years, thus indirectly improving original sudo as a by-product of this engagement.

Ubuntu’s status as the most widely-used distro means that what it does often impacts the wider Linux ecosystem. If coreutils and sudo-rs are a success, it’s a safe bet other distros will soon follow suit.