Monthly News – April 2026 – The Linux Mint Blog
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Clem talks about that in the comments. What are some no hassle, Debian based, rustless distros as alternative to Mint?

    • Nate Cox@programming.devEnglish
      321·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
        14·
        2 days ago

        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.

    • kbal@fedia.io
      9·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • wander1236@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        2 days ago

        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.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
        43·
        2 days ago

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

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    211·
    2 days ago

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

    • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
      5·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • forestbeasts@pawb.social
      32·
      23 hours ago

      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

        • forestbeasts@pawb.social
          11·
          50 minutes ago

          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.

    • Scoopta@programming.dev
      8·
      2 days ago

      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