Canonical has completed the migration of coreutils to Rust with the upcoming release Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray", making Ubuntu the first major Linux distribution to completely replace the traditional GNU Coreutils with the memory-safe uutils implementation.
What changed in the last phase?
The process of “oxidation” (or Rustification) of Ubuntu began in 2025 (with Ubuntu 25.10 incorporating the first tools like ls, cat, chmod, and du, as well as the Rust-based sudo). However, three of the most critical and widely used file management commands were left behind:
The draft Ubuntu release notes state:
“The default core utilities now run entirely on the uutils implementation, which is written in Rust. The remaining GNU utilities (cp, mv, and rm), which were kept for compatibility reasons, have now been replaced.”
Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) is currently under development and is scheduled for release in October 2026 (maybe the 15th if everything goes as planned).
As mentioned, the migration of commands such as `cp`, `mv` and `rm`, which previously came from the GNU Coreutils package, has been completed. There was no separate announcement regarding this change.
The Coreutils package includes basic Unix commands for file, text, and shell operations, such as `ls`, `cat`, `chmod`, `du`, `cp`, `mv`, and `rm`. These commands date back to the early Unix systems of the 1970s, and GNU provided their widespread implementation — written primarily in C — for Linux and other free Unix-like systems.
Ubuntu first released uutils as the default since version 25.10, gradually replacing the GNU versions.
As of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, most standard tools already run as applications written in Rust. However, Canonical has kept the GNU implementations for the `cp`, `mv`, and `rm` commands on the system. These three commands modify files and directory trees, and so were particularly critical for system control.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
