It seems Linux Mint is dropping GNU coreutils in favor of rust-coreutils following Ubuntu.

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blog.linuxmint.com/?p=5022#comments%3F=0

Clem talks about that in the comments. What are some no hassle, Debian based, rustless distros as alternative to Mint?

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Is this bad? I’m afraid I don’t have a good grasp on what the implications are of this.

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They’re only MIT licensed and not GPL so in that sense yeah

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I couldn’t imagine putting significant volunteer work into something that is not at least licensed under Apache, or more ideally at least LGPL.

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rust coreutils aren’t bad, but they are new. They probably work a bit faster than the originals, and they probably are long term more stable… but they are also probably short term less reliable because they don’t have decades of problem solving supporting them yet.

Most people likely won’t even notice a change has happened.

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They probably work a bit faster than the originals

There are some commands doing string processing that have been rewritten to use SIMD instructions which makes them inherently faster. On the other hand there are other commands where they’re performing worse than GNU coreutils: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Perf

Over time they will probably close the performance gap for those outliers, but if the GNU coreutils maintainers wanted to accelerate the same commands with SIMD instructions they could also do that. There’s no real reason why long-term one should be faster than the other, except for whichever project gets more attention from maintainers.

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You get your well measured response out of here.

Reactive answers only

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Oh shit, sorry.

The things that I like are better than the things that you like!

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Rust-coreutils may eventually become a suitable replacement for coreutils but it hasn’t yet existed for long enough to iron out all the bugs and there’s no real advantage to using it right now.

The idea is that Rust will make everything easier to maintain and improve in the long run, or something like that. It’s somewhat plausible, but it’s not totally obvious whether that will prove correct. So it’s easy to suspect that there must be some other unstated motivations behind it, although to me there don’t appear to be any in view.

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I think with things like this that are so foundational and far-reaching, there’s a point where you kind of just have to decide that the new thing is good enough and be ready for the rough parts of the transition.

Time is definitely a huge component of making a robust piece of software, but I think user diversity is also really important, and a project is going to hit a plateau of features and stability without wider adoption (even if it’s meant as a replacement for an existing thing) because the people working on it just don’t know about certain edge cases and don’t know to look for them.

That’s not me saying we should be migrating libraries and software just because someone remade them in a new language, but from what I know of Rust, it really does sound like a safer and and more approachable language than C++ and especially C.

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The motivations are purely dogmatic. Buggy and incomplete implementations have no place in mainstream distros.

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Ubuntu wanted to fully switch to rust for 26.04 but they weren’t fully ready yet so some are still Classic(?)

Whenever you’re replacing something tried and true it needs to be at least as good as the original. Too many bugs or missing features and all hell will break loose.

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I mean they have to follow Ubuntu so not surprised you have Linux mint Debian Edition

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they have to follow Ubuntu

Will Ubuntu do a hard replacement of coreutils with coreutils-rust, i.e. the usual C implentation of coreutils won’t be available anymore?

I assume they will simply install coreutils-rust instead of coreutils while keeping the latter in their repositories. So, in theory, Linux Mint may keep using the C implentated coreutils.

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Debian also uses Rust. Not the core utils but rust is now a build dep of Debian.

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Windows XP is Rustless if you’re looking for that. Same with TempleOS.

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Rustless, mint? Probably just use LMDE

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Why is rust-less a requirement for you?

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I’m not OP but maybe it’s not specifically rust that’s the problem but the fact that uutils is not actually a fully compatible replacement yet and he just wants gnutils

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Could be because of how hard Rust is being pushed.

Just like how Wayland is being pushed. And systemd is being pushed.

Alternatives to the Hotness™ are good. Programming language diversity is good.

Is C good? Well, it’s good at being simple to compile and at being low-level, but beyond that, nah not really. But is it better than Rust? IMO yeah. (But more for cultural reasons than for technical ones.)

Most coreutils stuff could honestly probably do really well written in Perl, too, with how string-processing-focused they are. String processing is like Perl’s whole schtick. Where’s our Perl coreutils implementation then!

– Frost

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Wdym Wayland is being pushed? As opposed to x11??

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Oh absolutely, 100%.

Have you seen all the people going “Wayland is THE FUTURE!! Get with the times! What do you mean it doesn’t work? What do you mean that’s by design? Shut up, stop impeding PROGRESS!”? Those people.

If you haven’t seen them, yeah, they’re a thing.

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Its 17 yrs old now, and most wms use it, some don’t, but almost all either support it or require it, and the only issues I’ve had are due to electron not having ozone on by default. I don’t think it’s progress necessarily, but it’s most definitely on par with x11 by now

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On par with X11? Have you tried to do anything even slightly “weird”?

It’s not on par with X11 and probably never will be, because the Wayland people just go “that’s out of scope! beg your DE to implement it!” for EVERYTHING.

KDE only VERY recently got the ability to do custom resolutions, which are absolutely critical if you have a CRT monitor, like one release before they’re going to drop X11 completely. I think a few smaller compositors also have a protocol for that, but like, Gnome? Good fucking luck. They HATE features and probably love the fact that they can just refuse to implement basic stuff and leave you with no way to work around them at the X level.

Our vim clipboard support still doesn’t work. It’s supposed to work (vim says it supports wayland). Guess what, it doesn’t.

wl-copy/paste needs to OPEN A WINDOW and take focus to get the clipboard (for… Reasons™… “but SECURITY!”…) and KDE’s focus stealing prevention blocked it from taking focus, meaning it would just hang forever until we added a window rule for it.

We still, as far as I know, have no way to disable our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a trackpad, without affecting the ability to use it in steam input, without affecting other trackpads on the system if there are any. Because “that’s weird, who would want that?” and nobody thought to build the tooling to let you do that.

I’m sorry no, that’s not a functioning replacement for X11. People SAY it is. That doesn’t make it true.

– Frost

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So your argument for x11 is Wayland doesn’t work on crts and doesn’t let all programs access clipboard and kb events freely? If you are using a cat, then use x11, thats why it’s an option

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Wayland fixes the screen tearing problem X11 always had. Yes, it is not 100% completed yet but development is going forward. X11 were really hard to work with due to all patching. Security is better with wayland. And no more xorg conf editing. I hate it to increase the mouse wheel speed.

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I support them on this move… Hope it ain’t too bumpy

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