Plans have been drafted to begin using more Rust-rewritten Linux system components within the Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year and ahead of next year’s all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Among the Rust components being planned for use in Ubuntu 25.10 is the Rust Coreutils “uutils” software.
Canonical engineer Jon Seager announced the plans today of “oxidising Ubuntu” and begin to more Rust rewritten components:
“Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal 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.”
Cited as the motivation are performance benefits as well as added safety provided by the Rust programming language. Among the Rust components initially being evaluated are the uutils version of cureitls, findutils, and diffutils. The sudo-rs software as the Rust written sudo is also being evaluated.
To help in testing/evaluation and comparing on Ubuntu Linux, Jon Seager has also been writing “oxidizr” as an easy way to replace some of these Rust components in place of their traditional counterparts on Ubuntu.
“With Ubuntu, we’re in a position to drive awareness and adoption of these modern equivalents by making them either trivially available, or the default implementation for the world’s most deployed Linux distribution.
We will need to do so carefully, and be willing to scale back on the ambition where appropriate to avoid diluting the promise of stability and reliability that the Ubuntu LTS releases have become known for, but I’m confident that we can make progress on these topics over the coming months.”
More details on these dramatic Rust plans for Ubuntu 25.10 / Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be found via the Ubuntu Discourse.
