Supposedly there are many not-very-well-tested changes in 25.10, be aware of that if you upgrade or try this out.
UUtils has, until now, been a niche project with few users. Putting it in the most popular desktop distro is going to expose it to many new users and use cases. Some of those are bound to find differences in behaviour between UUtils and GNU which should be considered bugs. No doubt.
But this “not-very-well tested” mantra is just silly. UUtils itself uses the exact same test suite as GNU does. They have been testing against this suite for years:
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking/blob/main/gnu-results.svg
While not all tests pass yet, the subset of functionality that people are likely to actually use is very well tested.
And the reason some bugs were found recently is precisely because UUtils were put through the normal test cycle for Ubuntu. A small number of bugs were caught which is the goal of that process. These are things that were previously not in the test suite. I see there are some new tests. UUtils may have contributed to that as new use cases were encountered that showed differences in behaviour between GNU and UUtils. The issues discovered were quickly fixed.
Think of what is involved in creating a distribution like Ubuntu and building the tens of thousands of packages that they ship in their repos—all with build scripts written for GNU Coreutils. This is all working with UUtils unmodified.
With the distro live now, the number of users will have already exploded. Where are the bug reports and articles about all the problems encountered? Crickets.
That does not mean there will not be any such cases. That is not my point at all. My point is that “not very well tested” does not jive with how well things are going considering what a massive change this is.
UUtils is much better tested than much of the software I use.
Thanks for the context. I did read the articles on this, but you’ve summed up the positives well.
Unfortunately, these articles also point out that putting uutils into the wild of 25.10 will doubtless reveal some hitherto unknown breakages and rough patches.
Which I agree with. No one is forcing anyone to use 25.10, but there is no better way to smoke test sw than pushing it to prod.
I’m a Debian user, so I have the luxury of waiting to see the outcome of these efforts for now.
Most Ubuntus lately had a long list of bugs that made them barely usable, this one seems to be the first that works quite well out of the box. Happy with it so far
Yupp, this is the public beta for 26.04 LTS.
Did they even resolve the issues with the Rust implementation of coreutils?
they were already fixed before the hand wringing articles were written
To quote a quote in the article - ”Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement of intent for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.”
If it doesn’t work out at all, they will likely pull the change for 26.04. The LTS has after all a need to be stable as a lot of companies rely on it.
Yes. They also reverted some of the still unfinished stuff to use the Gnu versions until the Rust versions are ready.
What did they revert? I had not heard that.
UUtils is just the “core” utils for now but that was always the plan. What got reverted?
I thought all the reported bugs were fixed (mostly before the articles were even written).
None of this means there are not more bugs or feature gaps of course. I am sure there are. This is the first test of UUtils at scale.
As it stands today, sudo-rs is the default sudo implementation on Ubuntu 25.10, and uutils’ coreutils has mostly replaced the GNU implementation, with a few exceptions, many of which will be resolved by releases in the coming weeks. These diversions back to the existing implementations demonstrate that stability and resilience are more important than “hype” in our approach: I expect us to have completed the migration during the next cycle, but not before the tools are ready.
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-25-10-a-retrospective/69127
I’m not sure, I’m keeping tabs on events vicariously through vlogs and such. I run Debian myself.
Upgraded my gaming system. Feels much snappier.
