Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year’s talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10’s adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.
Ledru’s presentation covered the progress made on Rust Coreutils in recent times and Ubuntu 25.10’s uptake of Rust Coreutils and continuing that for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. While some bugs have been found as a result of it, they have been fixed rather quickly. Ledru’s presentation also points out some of the popular trolling around Rust Coreutils and ultimately how many of those commenters have been proven wrong
Where would you say Firefox fits into this? (This question is not a gotchya; I am genuinely having trouble seeing whether it is a valid counter-example or not.)
The way I see (Mozilla) Firefox is a project whose devekopment is funded by its competitor - (Google/Alphabet) Chrome - so that there’s plausible deniability against anti-trust enforcement, the kinds of which Microsoft was subjected to some decades ago. I don’t think it’s a self-sustaining community project like say Debian is. Still use it over Chromium. Funnily, Chromium is a descendent of an organic community project - KHTML - that got extended and eventually taken over by our friendly familiar corporations.
Those are all good points.