Back in March some ideas were talked about by Canonical engineers for Ubuntu Linux to move to Rust Coreutils and other Rust-written system components. Some of this is likely to materialize for the Ubuntu 25.10 release due out in October to allow for sufficient testing ahead of the all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release next year. Today the more solidified plans have been laid out for moving to the Rust Coreutils as a replacement to GNU Coreutils with Ubuntu 25.10.
Julian Andres Klode has laid out the migration plans for moving to Rust-Coreutils with the Ubuntu 25.10 release. There will be the ability to revert back to GNU Coreutils if needed but the plan is for Rust Coreutils to be the default on this next Ubuntu Linux release.
This transition involves some “advanced dependency gymnastics” in renaming the existing coreutils package to gnu-coreutils on Ubuntu. Then a new “coreutils-from” package is to be introduced to help in the package transition over to rust-coreutils.
The downside of Rust Coreutils is being larger than GNU Coreutils. It is noted that a Docker image of Ubuntu is currently around 75MB but Rust-Coreutils itself comes in at around 25MB compared to 7MB for the classic GNU Coreutils. Thus Debian Docker images would now come in 24% larger than currently. GNU Coreutils might thus still be the default for Docker images and similar. There is also some AppArmor behavior to deal with for Rust Coreutils.
Those wanting to learn more about the transition plans to Rust-Coreutils for Ubuntu 25.10 can do so via this Ubuntu Discourse post published a short time ago and laying out all the technical details of this planned move.
