Ubuntu 25.10 will see a significant shift as Canonical replaces the traditional GNU coreutils written in C with the newer Rust-based uutils suite. This move is not merely for compatibility but aims to improve performance and reliability. Discussions are ongoing in the Ubuntu community, and so far, uutils have successfully passed around 500 out of 600 tests from the GNU coreutils. Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of engineering, is facilitating this transition with a tool named oxidizr to manage the integration process. This change represents a notable evolution in Ubuntu's core software infrastructure.
The significance of the change isn't primarily about compatibility. The uutils suite is actively tested against the GNU coreutils test suite, ensuring that differences with GNU are treated as bugs.
So far, the Rust coreutils pass approximately 500 out of 600 GNU tests, and with the additional attention this move will bring to the project, it seems likely that score will rapidly improve.
Jon Seager, the Canonical VP of engineering proposing the change, is providing a tool called oxidizr to globally turn the Rusty replacement parts on or off.
The coreutils are a core part of any Unix-like OS, providing essential commands that make a Unix-like OS function alongside the Linux kernel.
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