John Sieger (Jon Seager), Vice President of Canonical in Zanonical and the technical leader of the Ubuntu project, presented the initiative to replace system detle in the Ubuntu for analogues written in RUST. The first goal of the initiative is the translation of Ubuntu 25.10 to use Uutils tools by default instead of recruiting GNU Coreutils utilities. If the experiment is recognized as successful, then Uutils will also be involved by default in the Ubuntu LTS vehicle 26.04.
The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities that are part of Coreutils, including Sort, Cat, Chmod, Chown, Chroot, CP, Date, DD, Echo, Hostname, ID, LN, and LS. Currently, Uutils utilities are already used by default in the Apertis distribution based on Debian, as well as in independent Arynos (Serpentos) distribution. Last week, the issue of the package uutils coreutils 0.0.30 successfully passed 507 tests (in the last issue of 506, in a year old – 476) from the standard GNU Coreutils test set. 69 tests ended in failure, and 41 tests were missed. In the coming weeks, it is also planned to start working on a replacement in Ubuntu Utles SU and Sudo for a Sudo-RS package. Of the projects under consideration, ZLIB-RS and NTPD-RS are additionally mentioned.
The cause of migration is the desire to increase the reliability and safety of utilities underlying a distribution. The use of Rust will make it possible to reduce the risk of errors when working with memory, such as an appeal to the field of memory after it is released and exit beyond the boundary of the buffer. According to John Sieger, protection from such errors will increase security guarantees, and the general reliability of the system will increase with an increase in safety.
It is noted that Canonical considers different methods of improving quality and one of them is the supply of programs initially developed with an eye on safety, reliability, and correctness. For the basic components of the distribution, this is especially important, since if problems arise in low-level software, then these problems are reflected at work