Ubuntu’s plan to “carefully but purposefully oxidise” the distro has given us the perfect playground to see what really happens when you swap decades-old GNU coreutils for their shiny Rust equivalents. Spoiler: everything relies on way more weird flags than you think.

In this talk, I’ll share some fun, sharpest, and most unexpected lessons from bringing Rust Coreutils (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils) into Ubuntu: which obscure behaviors scripts secretly depend on, how packaging Essential tools can turn one missing corner-case into a boot failure, what benchmarks taught us, and how tools like oxidizr (https://github.com/jnsgruk/oxidizr) let us safely flip between GNU and Rust without breaking the universe.

If you’re curious about modernizing the Linux system — or just want real-world stories from the frontier of “C → Rust” rewrites — this session is for you.

Links:

Ubuntu “oxidising” initiative: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995

uutils/coreutils: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils