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It seems Linux Mint is dropping GNU coreutils in favor of rust-coreutils following Ubuntu.
(blog.linuxmint.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Why is this a problem?
One issue with this is that uutils is licensed under the MIT license, instead of coreutils' GPL license. In fact, for reasons I don't quite understand many of these rust rewrites are licensed with the MIT license. This will contribute to long term erosion of the rights granted by the GPL to software projects and users.
I think it's pretty obvious. Corpos are doing the EEE approach in the Linux ecosystem.
Yeah, the 'for reasons I don't quite understand' bit was intended slightly sarcastically.
It's bad that we're in an all-time low percentage of politically minded Linux users, in another era Rust would never be close to the Linux kernel or would pose as a threat to GNU/GPL.
Why is Rust your problem here? It’s a fantastic language. The issue is licensing
It's the tool used to enshitification of Linux, that's my problem. Tech and politics are indivisible. We're in lemmy.ml so thar should be a no brainer.
Also, technically, it's not very stable and there's no alternative compiler.
The main problem is that it’s just not battle tested like GNU coreutils are. And Canonical has only tested this in one cycle, 25.10, before introducing it in an LTS. Would’ve made more sense to wait until 26.10.
Other find problem with it being MIT licensed.
Mint is the last distro that would push something that isn't battle tested. IIRC they haven't even started working on Wayland support.
Have you read Clem's comment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG2ZMvBT8W4
4:25
(sorry my third party youtube frontend can't share timestamp links)
tldw:
FYI you can put &t=265 on the end of the URL for the timestamp.
Its two fold for many (not for me): Rust and MIT