On October 15, 2026, Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" reached general availability with a 7.3 kernel built from rc6, days before the final Linux 7.3 release expected on October 18. It is the first release where the entire coreutils set, including cp, mv and rm, runs on the Rust implementations from the uutils project.
The Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” beta is out: it completes the migration of coreutils to Rust, ships Linux 7.3, GNOME 51, and dbus-broker in place of dbus-daemon. Test it now to gauge the impact on your fleet before the October 15 stable release.
GNU Coreutils 9.12, released on September 14, 2026, delivers measurable wins — cut up to 4× faster, uniq up to 2.5× — and fixes a race that made -R commands fail against files deleted in parallel. A maintenance release that reminds us the GNU toolkit remains, against its Rust rewrite, the default foundation of every distribution.
On August 31, 2026, uutils released Rust Coreutils 0.11, whose GNU test-suite compatibility passed 95% and which adopts compiler-style diagnostics for chmod, cut, sort, and tr. The Rust rewrite of the core utilities has left the experimental stage.
The 0.10 release of Rust Coreutils passes 98% of GNU test suites with compiler-enforced memory safety. If you run Linux infrastructure, now is the time to start testing the switch.
