Canonical's John Sieger Unveils Ambitious Plans for Ubuntu's Future with Rust-Based Tools
In a bold move that could redefine the Ubuntu operating system, John Sieger, Vice President of Canonical and the technical leader behind the Ubuntu project, has announced a groundbreaking initiative aimed at replacing traditional system utilities with those written in the Rust programming language. This innovative proposal was presented during a recent conference, sparking excitement and curiosity among developers and users alike.
The core objective of this initiative is set for the upcoming release of Ubuntu 25.10, where the default tools will transition from the well-established GNU Coreutils to Uutils, a collection of utilities built using Rust. If this experimental transition is deemed successful, there are plans to incorporate Uutils as a standard feature in the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04.
The change is significant, affecting over a hundred tools that are essential to the Coreutils package, which includes fundamental operations like Sort, Cat, Chmod, Chown, Chroot, CP, Date, DD, Echo, Hostname, ID, LN, and LS. Currently, Uutils has already demonstrated its reliability in other Linux distributions, such as Apertis, which is based on Debian, and Arynos (also known as Serpentos). This precedential use of Uutils adds a layer of credibility to Canonical's plans.
Recent developments indicate that the Uutils coreutils package version 0.0.30 successfully cleared 507 tests from the standard GNU Coreutils test suite, a notable improvement from previous results where only 506 tests were passed last year and 476 tests were cleared a year prior. Although 69 tests failed, and 41 were missed, the trend shows a positive trajectory towards stability and reliability.
In addition to the core utilities transition, there is also an ambition to begin the replacement of the Ubuntu utilities SU and Sudo with a Rust-based alternative called Sudo-RS. Furthermore, Canonical is exploring the integration of additional projects like ZLIB-RS and NTPD-RS into the system, emphasizing their commitment to leveraging Rust's capabilities.
The driving force behind this migration to Rust is the desire to enhance the reliability and security of the underlying software utilities. Rust's unique memory management features are designed to mitigate common programming errors, such as accessing memory after it has been freed or exceeding buffer boundaries. John Sieger has expressed that these enhancements will not only bolster security guarantees but will also significantly improve the overall reliability of the system.
Canonical remains dedicated to exploring various methods for enhancing the quality of its software offerings. One of their strategies includes prioritizing the development of programs that are inherently designed with safety, reliability, and correctness in mind. This approach is particularly crucial for the basic components of the operating system since low-level software issues can reverberate throughout the entire system, impacting overall performance and user experience.
